Ocean temperatures – Is that warming statistically significant?

The oceans as measured by ARGO are warming, but that warming is not only far less than the models predicted, it is far less even than the instrument error.

The background of a crucial point

…

Everyone agrees: 90% of the energy in the Earth’s climate system is stored in the oceans. Rocks and sand don’t transmit the heat down, except at incredibly slow rates. The wil-o’-the-wisp-atmosphere hardly holds any energy. But water covers 70% of the surface, to an average depth of 3,700m, and it can store septillions of joules.

Climate models say the Earth’s energy balance is out of whack, and therefore 90% of the extra energy trapped by increasing greenhouse gases is stored in the ocean. The oceans are warming (probably), but the extra energy found in the top 700m of the world’s oceans is not enough. The modelers argued the heat was hidden below, that from 700m-2,000m. Skeptics argue the missing energy was flung out to space. This is the big enchilada, and as far as measuring oceans goes, everything changed in 2003 when we finally got the ARGO system, and that’s why it’s worth a closer look now.

David points out that the errors might be seriously miscalculated. A single ARGO buoy (which measures ocean temperatures down to 2000m) has an uncertainty of about 0.1C. But using 3,000 buoys doesn’t make that uncertainty dramatically smaller when all that data is combined together. It would, if the 3,000 buoys were all measuring the same swimming pool. But each buoy measures a different piece of ocean, and the ocean does not have one global temperature. Or it would if all the world’s ocean localities warmed by the same increment due to global warming, in each time period. But that would be a very brave assumption, because different parts of the world’s oceans probably warm at different rates due to global warming. So the measurement uncertainty is closer to the instrument error of 0.1C than the 0.004C as claimed by fans of man-made global crisis, and since the oceans have only warmed by about 0.02C (if that) since we’ve been measuring it with ARGO, that tiny amount of warming might just be noise. Going back further, the pre-ARGO data is so bad that longer datasets have much larger uncertainties.

Overview of Measuring Ocean Temperatures

According to many neat diagonal graphs, the oceans are warming, it’s alarming, and we have to spend billions to stop it. But is that warming enough, and how accurately can we measure it anyway?

For some inexplicable reason NOAA publish graphs of ocean heat content (OHC) but not ocean temperatures — the later are what the equipment measures, and what we relate to. So we need to convert OHC back to degrees C to find out the change in temperature.

Inspired by Willis Eschenbach, David Evans has done it with the ARGO data. (David doesn’t use non-ARGO data because he considers the XBT and buckets-off-boats stuff to be whimsical fantasy with error bars up where the unicorns fly, see below.) ARGO data only properly started in 2003, and any data at-depth before then was sparse. Compare it to the detail in our atmospheric measurements. We’ve been releasing weather-balloons twice a day from 800 sites around the Earth for five decades. To measure the global oceans we used 50 ships “of opportunity” (which happened to be in a shipping-lane) and XBT’s were fired down, not twice a day but once every few weeks. And vast tracts of the ocean hardly got measured, ever, especially the deepest parts. (XBT’s only get down to about 800m.)

ARGO data is good, but short. It’s fair to ask if such a short span is meaningful? Since thou shalt not create nor destroy energy — it is fair. The imbalance caused by extra CO2 has run day in and day out for nearly 3000 days since ARGO began. That energy has to be somewhere.

Where are the error bars?

This is the standard diagonal scare-graph for ocean temperatures, but with added notes about which parts are reliable.

It looks like a convincingly big rise, but it’s not enough, and the error bars are huge. Even on the accurate ARGO buoys error margins are probably not a lot less than 0.1C. GRAPH UPDATED*

David Evans separated the layers of ocean so we can compare the rate of warming in the deeper layer, 700m – 2,000m, with that from the top layer, 0 – 700m. (Bear in mind, the “top” 700 m is not exactly shallow — it is the hull-crush depth of a military submarine.) David found that the rate of warming in the deeper layer is the same as the rate in the top 700m.

Over this short period, there is no acceleration evident in either layer.

If the instrument error is 0.1C, the error bars would be off the scale. [Jo says, "look" the error bars are marked in white...] GRAPH UPDATED*

…

You might almost think the slight appearance of warming matters, but let’s put it in perspective — it’s not remotely close to what the models predicted.

GRAPH UPDATED*

Though the funny thing about having wider error bars is that even though the results look so different from the models, the predictions could still fall within the error bars! Why haven’t the modelers announced it? [Prediction from Jo: Trenberth channels Santer 2008, "reconciles model and ARGO data by revisiting error estimations!" Coming soon, with 17 authors and a major press release... Researchers investigate errors and find the missing energy!].

Dr David Evans discusses the ocean data

These notes about the graphs above and the following explanation of how he got the graphs and why he chooses to use ARGO over the other data sets are thanks to David.

Climate models predict the top 700m is warming at 0.07C per decade

The climate models predict that ocean heat content is increasing at about 0.7 × 10^22 Joules per year. (See Hansen et al, 2005: where the increase in ocean heat content per square meter of surface, in the upper 750m, according to typical models, is around 6.0 Watt·year/m2 per year, which converts to 0.7 × 10^22 Joules per year for the entire ocean as explained at Bob Tisdale’s site. Converting to temperature, this corresponds to about 0.7 × 0.01C = 0.007 C per year.)

The deeper ocean

The deeper 700m – 2,000m layer has warmed at the same rate as the upper 0 – 700m layer in the deeper Argo period (measured from Q1 2005).

This contradicts a meme that the deeper oceans are warming faster. It is correct that the heat content of the deeper layer is rising faster, but when converted to temperature it turns out that both layers have warmed at the same rate. There is 1.85 2.18 times as much water in the deeper layer (700m – 2,000m) as the upper layer (0 – 700m).

The warming of the planet is allegedly because of a warmer atmosphere, due to more CO2. The extra warmth would therefore have to pass from the atmosphere through the 0 – 700m layer to reach the 700 – 2,000m layer of the ocean. Schemes whereby currents could somehow move the heat from the surface to below 700m without warming the first 700m on average have been proposed, and maybe some are plausible — but warmer water rises.

The upper layer 0 – 700m is much better measured by Argo than the deeper 700 – 2,000m layer, with both earlier and denser data. In any conflict between the 0 – 700m and 700 – 2,000m data, the former is far more likely to be correct.

Before Argo

In the era before Argo (2003), measurements of ocean temperature were made from ships by putting a thermometer in a bucket of water drawn up from the surface or in the inlet valves of the engines, or by diving darts (XBTs) that could dive down to 800m with a thermometer, transmitting the data back to the ship along thin wires. The uncertainties in the temperature measurements made by the XBTs falling through the ocean were huge, because the XBTs fell too quickly to come into thermal equilibrium with the water around them. Also, there is a very strong temperature gradient in the surface layer of the ocean to below the thermocline , so the depth attributed to each temperature data point is arrived at from an assumed rate of descent of the instrument. Any deviation from the assumed rate of descent will put the instrument (and temperature) at the wrong depth, making the calculated temperature still more uncertain. Measurements from thermometers in buckets of water variously obtained are obviously hugely imprecise.

The geographic distribution of the sampling was sparse and very uneven, because the samples were taken along commercial shipping routes, somewhat irregularly. Most shipping lanes are in the northern hemisphere, but most of the world’s oceans are in the southern hemisphere — much of the southern ocean is hundreds or thousands of kilometers from where samples were taken. The oceans are really big, yet the presence of currents and layers at different temperatures means temperatures can be quite different in waters just a few hundred meters apart.

Obviously the errors are so huge compared to the expected/modeled increases (less than a tenth of a degree C per decade) that pre-Argo data is useless. One wonders at the morals of people using this data to convince people the world is warming.

Uncertainties in ARGO data are not as low as people claim

Errors are sometimes claimed for ARGO data of around 0.004C per data point, which is literally incredible. (The thermometers are that good? And the ocean is sampled often and closely enough… no, not even 3,000 floats/buoys is enough.) However the ARGO errors are much much smaller than the pre-ARGO measurements (maybe by two orders of magnitude, one for each temperature reading and one for the sparseness of sampling?).

The crux of the matter is the claim that ARGO errors are reduced because there are so many samples. This would be true if ARGO buoys were independent observations of the same quantity, that is, independent samples drawn on the same population. But each ARGO buoy independently measures a different part of the ocean — they are not all independently recording (changes in) “the global ocean temperature”. Thus 3,000 ARGO buoys do not give 3,000 independent estimates of the ocean heat content at a particular time; each observation gives a single estimate of the temperature at a particular location and depth. It is therefore erroneous to suggest that the estimate of the global average ocean temperature is given by the instrument accuracy divided by the square root of the number of observations (as you would if the observations were of the same quantity):

(0.1C)/(3000^⅟2) = 0.1C/55 ~ 0.002C.

The error of each estimate of global average temperature of an ocean layer remains closer to that of the instruments, or about 0.1C. There is some correlation between changes in temperature due to global warming in different parts of the ocean, so there might be some reduction below 0.1C, but how much and how has it been measured? Thus the alleged trends may have no statistical significance! (h/t Bill Kininmonth)

Data sources

Columns: Quarter, heat content of oceans to 700m in units of 10^22 Joules. The Argo system started in mid-2003 (though there were some ARGO floats in the 1990′s), so the Argo data starts at 2003-6 (the prior data is bucket and XBT data). It is seasonally corrected data (ugh), but that seems to be all there is available.

Columns: Quarter, heat content of oceans to 2,000m in units of 10^22 Joules. Starting Q1 2005, two years after 0 – 700m data. The records are sparser than the 0 – 700m data, so more uncertain. Again, seasonally corrected.

Conversion factors

Approximate conversions between changes in ocean heat content (OHC) and temperature, for the world’s oceans:

0 – 700m: 10^22 Joules = 0.0105 C

0 – 2000m: 10^22 Joules = 0.0036 C

0 – 100m: 10^22 Joules = 0.069 C

100m – 700m: 10^22 Joules = 0.012 C

700m – 2000m: 10^22 Joules = 0.0056 C

There are a couple of ways to estimate the volume of the oceans and hence the temperature. Ideally one would download data on the depth of the oceans, work out the weight of water in each horizontal layer of interest (water is nearly incompressible so volume is proportional to weight), and note that it takes 4 megajoules to warm a tonne of water by 1°C. More lazily:

See NOAA’s PDF, table T1 (on page 14): heat content change for the 0 – 700m layer of the world’s ocean of 15.913 * 10^22 Joules corresponds to a change in mean temperature of 0.168 deg C, so an increase of 10^22 Joules in 0-700m of the world’s oceans corresponds to a temperature rise of 0.168/15.913 = 0.0106 deg C.

Alternatively, use Willis Eschenbach’s calculations based on ocean areas and depths (whew, he did the calculation for us). Reading ΔH and ΔT from his graphs for 1955 to current, for 0 -100m, 100m-700m, and 700m – 2000m, and noting that mass = ΔH/(4× 10^6 * ΔT), gives the figures above.

UPDATE: Several commenters are pointing out just how much ocean volume each ARGO buoy is measuring.

On average there is one Argo buoy per 320km x 320km, or 102,400 square kilometres. Average depth as above in article, 3.6km, therefore on average each Argo buoy is sitting somewhere in 368,640 cubic kilometres of water.

• The sampling of the oceans is by no means as uniform as I had expected. Part of the ocean is undersampled, sometimes badly so, compared to other areas. Half of the global ocean has been sampled less than 20 times per 10,000 sq. km, and 14% has never been sampled by Argo floats at all.

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*UPDATED: The ARGO Graph now has another 6 months of data thanks to Nice One for noticing NODC had more up to date numbers. The update adds an uptick at the end, but makes little difference to the trend or the conclusion. As to the start date, ARGO began in the 1990′s, but it was not fully operational to 700m until mid 2003. The buoy data to 2000m was not fully operational until 2005. If someone can find predictions to 2000m David can compare models to observations for that depth.

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Rating: 9.2/10 (80 votes cast)

Ocean temperatures - Is that warming statistically significant?, 9.2 out of 10 based on 80 ratings

Climate Alchemy and probably most scientists not taught chemical thermodynamics don’t realise that the main heat transfer term in the oceans is the partial molar enthalpy transferred when the fresh, cold water sinking from melting ice in the Antarctic and Arctic summers is made more saline when it mixes with the warmer, more saline surface water for which solar energy has partially unmixed the ions.

Until Climate Alchemy has a number of top quality people, it will never advance beyond its present state of being a primitive, science-based religion, a Feynman cargo cult dependent on the fascistic Obummer to keep the air drops going.

Interesting argument.
How about “There are 500 million room thermostats in the world; each one has an accuracy of +/- 1 C.
(Numbers made up).
Therefore we know trends in worldwide room temperatures to an accuracy of
1/(500,000,000^0.5) = 0.000045 C.
Um, doesn’t sound right.

Dear Alex, that may not “sound right”, but if we actually collected data from all 500,000,000 room thermostats, and if those -1/+1 errors are all independent, then yes, we would be able to measure global temperature changes to an accuracy of 0.000045 C.

Unfortunately, most room thermostats are not connected to the Internet, so we don’t have the data.

Also, the errors might not be independent. For example there might be some common type of room thermostat which deteriorates in some particular way over time, leading to a systematic error.

And room thermostats are obviously affected by how much people leave their heaters on (or how much they open their windows), which could be another source of systematic error.

Here we go again. Scientists that don’t have disclose the accuracy of their experiment and the margin of error of there equipment. Go off on the world is warming rants again. Just like in the ninety’s with the Ice cores. Remember how they told use the world was warm based on their readings of the Ice that were measured and a rate over time of a 1000 years or so apart. While implying they were able to read the Ice cores like the pages of a book. Anyway isn’t the scientific method about evolving the theory based on the evidence and changing the theory to match the evidence as new evidence is discovered. The new evidence keep showing over and over again that the original theory from the 70′s is wrong but hay they just keep flogging the same dead horse. We need a investigation into the accuracy of all these reports from scientist that don’t evolve their theory’s to fit their own evidence but evolve their findings to fit their warming beliefs. We need full discloser not just the bottom line they won’t us the hear to prove that we need to continue their funding.

WOW! Second up for comment. Still nothing another five hours “waiting for moderation” won’t fix.

This is an extremely long, complicated and unnecessary rebuttal of fallacious “climate science” when a far simpler and more concise one is available. Forget about how the “missing heat” might get from the atmosphere down to the “ocean deeps” below 700 metres. There can be no NET energy transfer from the atmosphere to the oceans AT ALL.

NET heat energy transfer can only be in one direction between two thermodynamic systems not at equilibrium with each other. Clouds, the result of evaporation, are the visible, observable proof that NET heat energy transfer is FROM the oceans, TO the atmosphere. For as long as there are clouds forming, NET heat energy transfer is FROM the ocean TO the atmosphere. End of story.

So where is the “missing heat”? Simple answer, the so-called “energy budget” is wrong, and there isn’t any.

Where EXACTLY in the Greenhouse Theory do you believe it violates any Laws of Thermodynamics?

If no response is received within 48 hours this will be interpreted as a sign that you have seen the error of your ways.
In your response, if any, you should probably incorporate references to the measured IR absorption spectrum of CO2, the measured spectrum of the sun as seen at the top of atmosphere, the measured outgoing spectrum of earth, and some sign that you understand that a change in temperature is the net effect of ALL energy flows (large or small).

Where EXACTLY in the Greenhouse Theory do you believe it violates any Laws of Thermodynamics?

The short answer is, I don’t believe the Greenhouse Theory violates any Laws of Thermodynamics. Whether I believe in the Greenhouse Theory at all, or not, is irrelevant to this discussion, and this thread.

The claim by the climastrologists is as follows:
1) – Man-made CO2 is heating the atmosphere.
2) – This heating effect remains undetected because the extra atmospheric heat “ends up” in the oceans.

For this claim to be true, then there must be a NET transfer of heat energy FROM the atmosphere TO the oceans. Otherwise the atmosphere wouldn’t be “heating” the oceans.

However, the OBSERVED and MEASURED NET heat energy flow is FROM the oceans TO the atmosphere, as evidenced by evaporation and the subsequent formation of clouds, and eventually, precipitation.

Now, either the claim is true, or the observation is true. I’ll leave it up to the readers to decide. The one thing that can be said with certainty is that they can’t both be true at the same time, as that would indeed violate the Laws of Thermodynamics.

You might like to follow the excellent link provided by Yonniestone at Comment #22 below for further elucidation on the subject.

Apologies in advance that my reply doesn’t include

. . . references to the measured IR absorption spectrum of CO2, the measured spectrum of the sun as seen at the top of atmosphere, the measured outgoing spectrum of earth . . .

I don’t believe the Greenhouse Theory violates any Laws of Thermodynamics.

I understood your earlier exclamation “There can be no NET energy transfer from the atmosphere to the oceans AT ALL” to suggest that the Greenhouse Theory did predict a NET transfer of energy from the atmosphere to the oceans.
Whereas it does not.
If you’d left it at that then you would have had my apology for misunderstanding your emphasis.
But it gets worse.

The claim by the climastrologists is as follows:
1) – Man-made CO2 is heating the atmosphere.
2) – This heating effect remains undetected because the extra atmospheric heat “ends up” in the oceans.
For this claim to be true, then there must be a NET transfer of heat energy FROM the atmosphere TO the oceans.

False. A thought experiment (or one you could actually do if you have a small camping stove handy) shows this.
You have an enclosed well-insulated pot half-filled with water with an electric heating element suspended in air near the top. The element is shielded from direct line of sight to the water by a white metal sheet, which leaves air gaps near its edges to allow convection. Eventually the air above the water exceeds 100 Celsius. Evaporation will commence long before this temperature is reached and were it not for the water vapour condensing on the inside of the container you would have clouds. Yet all the time there is a net transfer of energy from the mini-atmosphere to the mini-ocean. While the real atmosphere is not beset by giant electrical coils, it does (in theory) have infrared emitters (GHGs) which alter the equilibrium temperature of the ocean surface, so the thought experiment is enough to show that the line of reasoning you presented is unphysical.

Now back to the real ocean. If the surface experiences some extra downwards IR flux, surface temperature increases, the temperature gradient increases, so the heat moves quicker until the total heat transport away from the surface (in all directions, heat is not partisan) equals the new total power being input to it. So for some time even while surface temperatures are constant the deeper ocean can be warming. Yet all the time the power level of evaporation and conduction into the atmosphere may be larger than the power being sent downwards.
eg if transfers happen at these powers: Space–>Ocean = 240, Ocean–>Air = 240, Air–>Ocean = 5, Air–>Space = 235.
Then temporarily the net fluxes are: Space–>Ocean = 240, Ocean–>Air = 235, Air–>Space = 235.
The delta heat content is: dSpace/dt=-5 (thanks Sun), dAir/dt=0, dOcean/dt=+5.
The energy all balances, the ocean heats, the clouds still formed, no laws got broken.
Where is the trick? The trick is that you cannot think of the ocean and air in isolation because they are not a closed system, the Sun is putting in energy to the ocean all the time and that is ultimately the cause of warming the ocean. Fiddling with GHGs changes the distribution of the Sun’s energy until a new equilibrium is reached.

No NET transfer from atmosphere to ocean is needed for ocean warming. A slight reduction in the rate of transfer from ocean to air courtesy of more IR returned from the air is sufficient to force a higher surface temperature.

However, the OBSERVED and MEASURED NET heat energy flow is FROM the oceans TO the atmosphere

This is not quite true. A NET figure is the result of a calculation. It is a derived abstract quantity, not an observed real quantity. It must be calculated from individual measurements of the real additive and subtractive quantities.
Just the same, you cannot observe the NET force on an object, you can only calculate it from a measured acceleration or by summing the measured incident forces.

Clouds do form, but the observation you were referring to was the unobservable observation of a NET quantity.

The one thing that can be said with certainty is that they can’t both be true at the same time, as that would indeed violate the Laws of Thermodynamics.

The one thing you could say with certainty was false. A cool object can have the effect of warming a warm object when the cool object decreases its refrigeration effect on the warm object while a frequently neglected 3rd really hot object is actually doing all the heating.

We already agreed the case for CAGW is exaggerated.
I hope you would also agree that a refrigerator that develops a leak can make beer get warmer even when the refrigerator is colder than the beer.
Maybe the beer theory was a better explanation all along.

1. I am skeptical about thought experiments until they have been verified. I performed my own experiment in which I reflected the radiation of a black tin back onto itself with a surround of aluminium foil. The top of the tin was constantly heated by the sun. The tin did not get any warmer with the foil reflector in place. That experiment did not verify the back radiation hyphothesis.

2. In your second example the oceans get an extra 5 watts of input energy. Therefore they should heat up! But Jo has just shown us that there is no evidence of any heating occurring.

Some of us are a little sensitive about people invoking the second law of thermodynamics. The second law is the most abused law in all of science. In particular people who later make the disingenuous claim that they “never did understand alll that scientifical stuff anyway” have no business messing with it.

There are a bunch of particularly nasty serial second law abusers hanging around climate sceptic blogs at the moment spouting nonsense about the greenhouse effect being impossible because a cold object cannot heat a hot one. Some of us suspect these people may even be 5th columnists trying to make sceptics look bad. This might explain why they are so energetic in spamming their brand of twisted thinking on climate forums.

Anthony Watts has expelled them from his blog and it looks to me like they may be trying to set up shop here.

As the only person here to make the “disingenuous” claim that I “never did understand alll that scientifical stuff anyway” (complete with typo error), I feel I should point out the following facts:

1) – I never invoked, or even brought up the Second, or indeed ANY Law of Thermodynamics. Andrew did that in his misguided attempt to discredit me for something I never said or claimed in the first place.

2) – I have never “nastily” or “serially” abused anything or anyone, least of all the poor old Second Law.

3) – I have never argued that the “Greenhouse Effect” is “impossible because a cold object cannot heat a hot one”. I can think of, and have used, many ways to attack the absurdity of CO2-induced Catastrophic Anthropogenic Global Warming (CAGW) without descending into what most lay-readers consider the realm of Science-Fiction-Fantasy (regardless of the truth or otherwise of the pure physics behind it).

4) – As to being some kind of “Johnny-come-lately” fifth columnist, I wrote my first published article attacking CO2-induced CAGW in October 1986, and have continued to write prolifically on the subject ever since, including two best-selling books. You were probably, at best, running around a school playground at the time, in knee-high shorts.

So tell me, when did YOU decide to jump on the band-wagon I built for you?

5) – Anthony Watts banned the Skydragons from his site. I have no idea if they have a valid point or not. As I said previously, my level of knowledge and understanding is not up to the task. However, in summarily banning them, Anthony displayed exactly the same kind of intolerance to alternative points of view as can readily be found on just about any climastrology blog.

I think Anthony did himself and his blog a great disservice, but it is his blog, and his rules. After three years of being an avid daily visitor (and commentor), I crossed him off my daily “must read” list. I’m pretty certain a lot of other people did too.

NET heat energy transfer can only be in one direction between two thermodynamic systems not at equilibrium with each other. Clouds, the result of evaporation, are the visible, observable proof that NET heat energy transfer is FROM the oceans, TO the atmosphere. For as long as there are clouds forming, NET heat energy transfer is FROM the ocean TO the atmosphere. End of story.

I do apologise. I thought this mangled statement was your attempt to quote the second law. You certainly sound like a sky dragon here with your use of the magic word “thermodynamical” and statements about heat only flowing in one direction. Perhaps I was hasty in jumping to conclusions. It looks to me from the responses in this thread that I am not the only one to have jumped to this conclusion.

It might be wise to refrain from using words like thermodynamical if you do not intend to actually talk about thermodynamics. Especially at this time when people are a little touchy about the subject.

BTW I support Anthony’s decision. Running a blog is always an exercise in compromise. No matter what set of rules you come up with, someone will always come along and behave in a way that forces you to make an exception. Anthony generally manages to keep to the philosophy of “all things in moderation, especially moderation”. I do still see sky dragons posting there. He has just decided to sit on their efforts to turn every thread into a discussion of their pet theories.

You certainly sound like a sky dragon here with your use of the magic word “thermodynamical”** and statements about heat only flowing in one direction.

At no stage did I suggest heat can only flow in one direction. I stated that the NET TRANSFER of heat energy can only be in one direction, in this particular case, FROM the oceans TO the atmosphere.

Obviously you (and Andrew) have no concept of the meaning of the word NET, so I’ll try substitution:

The SUM TOTAL of all heat energy transfers can only be in one direction, in this particular case, FROM the oceans TO the atmosphere.

.**BTW – up until I wrote this comment, the word “thermodynamical” only appeared twice in this entire post by JO. BOTH times it is in your comment at 4.1.1.2 above. I certainly never used it, and neither did anyone else.

Only you.

Perhaps if you (and Andrew) stopped looking for imaginary skydragons to slay and concentrated on what people actually wrote, your comprehension skills might improve a tad.

The oceans as measured by ARGO are warming, but that warming is not only far less than the models predicted, it is far less even than the instrument error.

(my emphasis).

From paragraph 3;

So the measurement uncertainty is closer to the instrument error of 0.1C than the 0.004C as claimed by fans of man-made global crisis, and since the oceans have only warmed by about 0.02C (if that) since we’ve been measuring it with ARGO, that tiny amount of warming might just be noise

.

Jo seems to be hedging her bets here. I took it that the measurement errors are of the order of 0.1 degree C. If that is indeed the case then any apparent warming of 0.02C as shown in graphs 1 and 2 is just noise and there is no evidence of any warming of the Oceans in the ARGO data.

Therefore I stand by my comment. If that is the wrong way to interpret measurement error then I don’t mind being corrected.

So many words and so much effort to ultimately (and, I’m sure, unintentionally), admit that you are wrong. All that effort and you never even addressed the original issue, which is:

How does the “missing (CO2-induced) heat” from the atmosphere, get into the ocean?

What you have described, in your “thought experiment”, and your calculations, and your ramblings, is how a warmer atmosphere might keep more heat (from the sun) in the oceans for longer, sort of like a blanket. You openly admit the actual source of the “extra” “trapped” heat is the sun, NOT the atmosphere, with the following phrases:

. . . the Sun is putting in energy to the ocean all the time and that is ultimately the cause of warming the ocean.

and

No NET transfer from atmosphere to ocean is needed for ocean warming. A slight reduction in the rate of transfer from ocean to air courtesy of more IR returned from the air is sufficient to force a higher surface temperature.

On one and only thing you are right, there is no need for a NET transfer (of energy) from the atmosphere to the ocean to explain ocean warming. There are a multitude of things that could cause warming of the ocean.

However, unfortunately (for you) there IS a need for a NET energy transfer FROM the atmosphere TO the ocean, if we are to accept the climastrologists’ explanation for the “missing” atmospheric heat.

In short, Andrew, you are so wrapped up in your need to protect your precious “Greenhouse Gas Effect” (which I never even addressed, let alone challenged), that you are incapable of even recognising the actual issue, let alone addressing it with anything approaching intellectual acumen.

Admitting I’m wrong? You must have a reading problem. When I’m wrong it will be a clear admission and there will be no need to squint and read between the lines or smoke whatever it is that’s convinced you my opinion has changed at all in the last 8 hours.

there must be a NET transfer of heat energy FROM the atmosphere TO the oceans. Otherwise the atmosphere wouldn’t be “heating” the oceans.
[...]
On one and only thing you are right, there is no need for a NET transfer (of energy) from the atmosphere to the ocean to explain ocean warming.

Hooray! One block knocked out of the stone wall, only a half dozen to go.

there IS a need for a NET energy transfer FROM the atmosphere TO the ocean, if we are to accept the climastrologists’ explanation for the “missing” atmospheric heat.

And we were so close. So close.
Nope that’s a strawman. You created the requirement of a net transfer from the atmosphere to the ocean, whereas I explained with two examples that the greenhouse effect can put heat in the oceans due to a change in greenhouse gases despite a flatlining in surface temperatures of both ocean and air AND an uninterrupted net transfer from ocean to air.
I already explained the answer, you just didn’t see the relevance. That’s possibly because in my example dAir/dt was zero. But I’m sure you can see that these transfers would give you air absorbing as much power as the ocean: Space–>Ocean = 240, Ocean–>Air = 240, Air–>Ocean = 5, Air–>Space = 230.
Now what if that was the situation initially soon after this GHG impulse and the majority of air (except for the ocean boundary layer), having a far lower heat capacity than water, rapidly warmed to its new equilibrium temperature? Well what happens next is the first set of example parameters I suggested in previous comment. Flatline in total air heat content, flatline in air temperature, and yet some energy is flowing from the air into the ocean, going downwards.
HOW? Aha! You think that identifying the Sun as the origin of all the heat is some sort of contradiction with saying energy is moving from air to ocean? Ahhh. Okay I am seeing your original emphasis now and possibly the source of confusion. But it seems this “actual issue” that you want to assert is being dealt with in a comment further below so I’ll resume there.

I’m amused that I am apparently some sort of GHG Gollum, forever protective of my preciousssss effect. I didn’t even know it was mine. Actually it sounds like far too much power for one person to hold and I’m not overly fond of GHG theory anyway, it’s just the option on the table that doesn’t require bending the rules for one hated gas, so I hereby donate the theory back to all the gases with non-zero infrared absorption spectra.

Plus you’re now tossing out insults at me which I have not done so far. Well okay, maybe the Princess thing came across as really insulting, but I honestly thought I was just being funny there. Anyhow let’s not do that any more.

You are continuously piddling on about how the blanketing effect of greenhouse gases could cause the oceans to end up warmer from energy from the sun, when it is not even the issue I raised. Dolphins jumping out of the water into the air MIGHT cause some transfer heat energy. Who cares?

The claim by the scientists is that:

1) – Greenhouse gases are continuing to cause the level of heat energy in the atmosphere to rise.
2) – We can’t detect the rise because the additional atmospheric heat energy is somehow being transmitted into the oceans.

For the atmosphere to be heating the oceans (not buffering the loss of heat from the oceans which you keep describing), but actually HEATING the oceans, there HAS to be a NET transfer of heat energy FROM the atmosphere TO the oceans.

And that is BS, and yes, it does violate the Second Law, and no, it has SFA to do with skydragons or whether the Greenhouse Effect is “real” or not.

And yes, your “Princess Slayer” (complete with cartoon links) jibe was insulting and you’re either a bloody hypocrite or an idiot if you didn’t think it would not provoke some kind of reaction in kind.

What is this, climatology or Flanneryology? Do you expect me to defend his Gaia Superorganism beliefs too?
Who cares what that mob of morons and panhandlers think. Totally irrelevant.

I have never advocated a position that requires any SLoT violation. You continue to ignore the sun, thus leading you to the false conclusion that the oceans cannot warm unless there is a NET transfer of energy from the air to the ocean, and sending us both on some merry dance up the False Dichotomy garden path.

Sorry Mr President, I don’t dance.
I think we’re finished with this topic.

In short, our influence on our climate, even if we really tried, is miniscule!

Truth and succinctness all in one.

It’s one thing to say AS THAT AUTHOR DOES that our influence is miniscule. His thesis is that we should not be looking to CO2 as our first port of call in explaining recent climate change when the sun is more obvious. Hooray!
It is conceptually, logically, and physically a very different proposition from saying there is no greenhouse effect.
I can feel thermal radiation, I believe CO2 has a measured IR absorption spectrum, I believe a CO2 molecule is not a bottomless pit of energy that can be filled without ever spilling over, and this predictable spilling over is measured from spectrometers on satellites and the ground, therefore there is a CO2 greenhouse effect whose net effect on the climate is of some small and as yet imprecisely known size.

What would change my mind? Well… I guess if every measurement of CO2 spectra was exposed as a lie, that would change my mind for sure. But I will have a think about what a less extreme falsification condition might be.

“It is conceptually, logically, and physically a very different proposition from saying there is no greenhouse effect.” No-one here has said this?

No REAL scientist disagrees with the greenhouse effect and there’s many of the REAL deniers (AGW scientists) who are seriously stepping back from their previously held views on the ACTUAL effect of a doubling of CO2 on the earths temperature.

It is conceptually, logically, and physically a very different proposition from saying there is no greenhouse effect.

I must be having a brainsnap. Could you please name the person, and point out the comment, anywhere in this #4 thread, where anybody claimed there “is no greenhouse effect”?

For the record, I happen to accept there is as much reason to think that CO2 cools the atmosphere, as there is to believe that it warms it. But that has absolutely nothing to do with the comments here, which are addressing the issue of how the extra “warmth” (heat energy from CO2), “finds” its way into the oceans.

For the moment let’s all accept that CO2 is a magical gas, capable (at forty parts per million), of doubling the heat content of the atmosphere in six months. However, the measurable heat content of the atmosphere has not gone up one whit in those six months. In fact, recent measurements are that the atmospheric heat content is going down.

The official, climastrology-approved explanation is that the additional CO2-induced heat energy is somehow being REMOVED from the atmosphere, and conveyed into the deep oceans.

A2) The Sun is the source of all this energy as it is the hottest thing around, and by the greenhouse explanation above the GHGs redistribute insolation into the ocean until their heating from above and the tendency for warm water to rise once again cancel each other out and the new stable (w.r.t. averaging over 24h) vertical gradient is attained.

Could you please name the person, and point out the comment, anywhere in this #4 thread, where anybody claimed there “is no greenhouse effect”?

You didn’t use those specific words, but this was surely the gist of your initial comment at #4 where you stated that a far simpler and more concise rebuttal of fallacious “climate science” is that there can be no NET energy transfer from the atmosphere to the oceans AT ALL.
That’s virtually a carbon copy of the typical Slayer argument that greenhouse theory must be wrong because it requires a cooler object heating a warmer object.

That statement cannot have been connected with the specific question of how energy moves out of the air into the deep ocean because you had just literally told us to “Forget about how the missing heat might get from the atmosphere down to the ocean deeps below 700 metres.”
Since then you’ve said that “the original issue is: How does the missing (CO2-induced) heat from the atmosphere, get into the ocean?”
In other words, what you actually told us to forget about was always the “actual” and “original” issue. It seems I was not the only one who interpreted your initial phraseology literally.
So, erm, for future, in your opening remark don’t tell people to forget about your main point of contention.

It is precisely because there is some controversy about phraseology concerning greenhouse gas theory and transfers of energy, that I pointedly used the term NET energy transfer. While all sorts of debates can be forwarded on the possibilities of hypothetical energy movement, there can only one NET result.

Between two systems not at thermodynamic equilibrium, NET energy transfer can only be in one direction – from the system of higher energy to the system of lower energy, in this case, FROM the oceans, TO the atmosphere.

That being the case, it matters not one whit whether the claim is that the “missing” energy (from the atmosphere) is “heating” the ocean surface, or the ocean deeps.

BOTH claims are equally preposterous and BOTH require a violation of the Second Law.

BOTH claims are equally preposterous and BOTH require a violation of the Second Law.

You claimed not to be a second law abuser, and yet here you are abusing the second law. And once again you are talking confused nonsense about heat flowing in only one direction. I retract my earlier apology.

Energy enters the sea
+ mostly from the sun
+ some small amount from geothermal heating

Energy leaves the sea
+ by IR radiation to space and atmosphere at night
+ by evaporation

If the two rates are not in balance the ocean will warm or cool over time. The oceans can be warmed just as readily by slowing the rate at which energy leaves the sea as by increasing the rate that energy flows into it.

There is absolutely no need for anyone to show you a way that heat can go from the atmosphere to the sea. That isn’t the issue. That is a straw man of your own invention. When you keep pounding on this you sound like someone demanding to know why, if the earth is round, Australians don’t all fall off the bottom.

(The answer of course is that Australians have really good velcro on the soles of their shoes.)

The oceans contain immense heat because they are (at least) 273 degrees above absolute zero. During the day the sea warms up adding slightly to this immense amount of heat energy. During the night it cools back down and loses this extra amount of heat.

Is that really so hard to understand. If the ocean didn’t cool as much at night as it warmed during the day it would have boiled by now! Sheesh!

There is absolutely no need for anyone to show you a way that heat can go from the atmosphere to the sea. That isn’t the issue. That is a straw man of your own invention.

The fact that it is the climastrologists themselves, not me, who claim a net energy transfer FROM the atmosphere, TO the oceans (to explain their “missing” atmospheric heat), has been addressed in the following posts:

#4, 4.1.1, #4.1.1.1.1, #4.1.2.1.2, and #5.1.1.1.1.

I see little point in repeating myself yet again. Especially to a troll.

Far from being MY “straw man”, it is the stinking dead albatross of flawed and discredited CAGW “science” hanging around the necks of our “climate scientists”.

I wrote to Messrs Flannery, Karoly and Braganza mentioned in #4.1.1.1.1 above, politely asking them to explain the process whereby their “missing heat” got into the oceans, and never received a reply.

.
While you’re here, mind explaining how you came to credit me with using the term “thermodynamical” at #4.1.1.1.2 above, when YOU are the only person to have used the term?

The fact that it is the climastrologists themselves, not me, who claim a net energy transfer FROM the atmosphere, TO the oceans (to explain their “missing” atmospheric heat), has been addressed in the following posts:

#4, 4.1.1, #4.1.1.1.1, #4.1.2.1.2, and #5.1.1.1.1.

I don’t care what some climatologist may have said. You are the one claiming that the ocean cannot warm unless heat flows directly to it from the atmosphere. Indeed you’ve been challenging people around here to show how this can happen and claiming that if they cannot then it is impossible for the greenhouse effect to warm the oceans. If you want to raise this challenge you (as in you personally) need to be able to defend the need for it.

Far from being MY “straw man”, it is the stinking dead albatross of flawed and discredited CAGW “science” hanging around the necks of our “climate scientists”.

Very poetic. Sounds like you disagree with these guys. Can I presume from this that you and I agree that heat doesn’t have to flow directly from the atmosphere to the oceans for the oceans to warm.

I wrote to Messrs Flannery, Karoly and Braganza mentioned in #4.1.1.1.1 above, politely asking them to explain the process whereby their “missing heat” got into the oceans, and never received a reply.

Who cares. Don’t care what Flannery said or didn’t say.

While you’re here, mind explaining how you came to credit me with using the term “thermodynamical” at #4.1.1.1.2 above, when YOU are the only person to have used the term?

I am SO sorry. You used the word “thermodynamic” and I misremembered it as “thermodynamical”. There is of course a massive difference between the two … NOT!

I don’t care what some climatologist may have said. You are the one claiming that the ocean cannot warm unless heat flows directly to it from the atmosphere.

Exactly where did I ever claim that? Or even anything like that? What I have written is that the climastrologist’s claim that the so-called “missing” atmospheric heat has somehow found its way DIRECTLY into the oceans, and that such a transfer is impossible.

Indeed you’ve been challenging people around here to show how this can happen and claiming that if they cannot then it is impossible for the greenhouse effect to warm the oceans.

No. I’ve challenged people to show how the “missing” atmospheric heat can somehow DIRECTLY be transmitted to the oceans (which is why it is “missing”). I’ve never challenged the notion that, if it exists, greenhouse warming of the atmosphere could lead to more heat being RETAINED by the oceans, which is not nearly the same thing as a DIRECT transfer of heat energy FROM the atmosphere, TO the oceans.

Can I presume from this that you and I agree that heat doesn’t have to flow directly from the atmosphere to the oceans for the oceans to warm.

And where did I ever say, or even hint, that heat has to flow directly from the atmosphere to the oceans, for the oceans to warm?

Who cares. Don’t care what Flannery said or didn’t say.

Of course you don’t. The fact that my original post that started this entire thread was in reference to claims made by our climastrologists, would be of little interest to you. You are, after all, simply a troll attempting to confuse and obfuscate.

I am SO sorry. You used the word “thermodynamic” and I misremembered it as “thermodynamical”. There is of course a massive difference between the two … NOT!

Epic fail, Ian H. To quote you:

. . . you certainly sound like a sky dragon here with your use of the magic word “thermodynamical”

1) – I used neither “thermodynamic” nor “thermodynamical” in my original post.

2) – I only used it in a subsequent post, block-quoting Andrew MacRae (strange, you didn’t find his use of the word “skydragonish” or “magical”).

3) – In that reply post I used it twice, both times as part of the full expression “Laws of Thermodynamics”. That is a very mundane expression, used by many here. Neither “skydragonish”, nor “magical”.

On the other hand, stating the “Laws of Thermodynamicals” would be rather strange. So I think it’s rather obvious that you used it merely as a jump-in point to start your little spacer campaign.

The oceans contain immense heat because they are (at least) 273 degrees above absolute zero. During the day the sea warms up adding slightly to this immense amount of heat energy. During the night it cools back down and loses this extra amount of heat.

Is that really so hard to understand. If the ocean didn’t cool as much at night as it warmed during the day it would have boiled by now! Sheesh!

semantics, and

Pathetic response. Just pathetic.

ridicule.

.
Semantics and ridicule. The last two refuges for trolls with no scientific backing for their statements.

If at night the whole ocean uniformly lost all the heat it had accumulated during the previous day, there would be no ocean currents. There would be no North Atlantic Conveyor, and England would be an ice block.

But you knew that already. You’re not even trying anymore – just playing “spacer” on this thread, to try and confuse readers genuinely looking for information.

Semantics and ridicule. The last two refuges for trolls with no scientific backing for their statements.

I’m not backing down from you no matter how much you bluster and call me names. You are wrong. Admit it.

If at night the whole ocean uniformly lost all the heat it had accumulated during the previous day, there would be no ocean currents. There would be no North Atlantic Conveyor, and England would be an ice block.

Speaking as I was about night and day presumably you understood I was talking about the heating of a small piece of ocean and not of the ocean as a whole. But if you want to go large scale then fine.

All these currents do is move the heat around. There is still approximately as much heat IN TOTO going into the oceans each day as going out. The difference (if any) is tiny by comparison with the total flux, and will result in the oceans as a whole gradually acquiring or losing heat and warming or cooling ever so slightly over time. And that is precisely what this article is about – the attempt to measure if there is any change in the overall heat content of the oceans using ARGO buoys.

But you knew that already. You’re not even trying anymore – just playing “spacer” on this thread, to try and confuse readers genuinely looking for information.

Well I do admit that it hasn’t required much effort to refute your more recent attempts. But that is your fault for making such weak arguments. And to readers genuinely looking for information I’d just like to say “Please ignore Nunov. There are many sceptics with sane rational arguments. He isn’t one of them. Don’t think that we are all like him.”

“Please ignore Nunov. There are many sceptics with sane rational arguments. He isn’t one of them.”

Judging from the thumb count, I’d say you lucked out big time on that one.

The people who come here aren’t fools, Ian H. They can recognise a spacer troll when they see one. They also know what “misdirection” means. And if they didn’t, you have certainly just given them an excellent example to learn from.

One other bit of wisdom about the readers here. They are perfectly capable of making up their own minds. They don’t need to be told who or what to believe. In fact, most of them resent it.

You haven’t the faintest knowledge of how the real science operates. In 1981 Hansen et al, their first modelling paper, wrote this: 1981_Hansen_etal.pdf

‘Carbon dioxide absorbs in the atmospheric “window” from 7 to 14 micrometers which transmits thermal radiation emitted by the earth’s surface and lower atmosphere. Increased atmospheric CO2 tends to close this window and cause outgoing radiation to emerge from higher, colder levels, thus warming the surface and lower atmosphere by the so called greenhouse mechanism’

They made a mistake. Let’s also be clear about another mistake: the Aarhenius claim of black body surface emission is total bunkum as any competent physicist or engineer will confirm so the whole caboodle depends on the OLR.

There is a bit of reduced CO2 IR emission in the 7 – 14 µm range but the real loss is at ~15 µm and it’s caused by self-absorption. However, it depends on their being no bypass mechanism in the atmospheric window. There is such a mechanism and it means CO2-AGW is kept at zero.

So, the team started with a big mistake, became committed and then had to hide the errors. At some time they changed to the ’15 µm ‘OLR bite’, which is plausible to the dim-witted: PhysTodayRT2011.pdf However, it doesn’t cut the mustard.

These people have been deceiving us for 30 years. I want Hansen to be arraigned for scientific fraud so he can be questioned under oath. As for Pierrehumnbert, he puts in clever weasel words…..

Well it’s not dim-witted to assume the output of HITRAN is true when I have no information to the contrary.
In the main longwave portion between 17 and 14μm CO2 absorption is over 20 times stronger than water.

If you actually have experimental evidence to the contrary then this really strikes at the notion of what the absorption spectrum really is, which I find hard to believe. I mean this molecule has been measured, that’s empirical, it is nett of all possible mechanisms, so surely it is true regardless of what other “self-absorption” theory is put forth to explain why the spectrum is what it is?

Could you elaborate?

And since you believe I am dimwitted it would be illogical for you to explain it in terse out-of-order jargon as you tended to do in the past. You’ll have to really spell it out slowly, sorry.

I’m not sure who downvoted you as you are only trying to be helpful in pointing to a source.
I have no time to read that now, but will read it tomorrow evening. Your description of CO2 cooling the upper atmosphere sounds like Roy Spencer’s explanation.

That turned out to be the article I thought it would be and have read it before. Oddly enough, the first time I heard about it was from one of the Slayers trumpeting “See! A total reversal by NASA! Slayer triumph! NASA satellite proves CO2 cools the earth instead of warming it!” or some such nonsense. It says nothing about CO2′s greenhouse effect because it reports the upper atmosphere absorbing high velocity helium and hydrogen and other particles, not infra-red light. This says nothing about the effect of CO2 on the troposphere or the oceans. It was unrelated to the Slayer position.
Any GHG has absorption in the thermal spectrum but also can radiate at the same frequencies. This is expected.
If H2O could exist that high in the atmosphere it would do an even better job of cooling off the Earth.

More insane WRONG physics. Oceans are a massive heat sink/source warm water rises etc. Also any heat source from undersea volcanism in TOTALY unknown in present form and hardly studies OR measured. Likeyhood of being quite allot more than estimated. Theres is ONLY 2 possible sources of any ocean heat 1 Solar. 2. Under sea from the earths interior. 1 requires IR radiation to heat the ocean surfaces.

What you say is essentially true. But I would like to point out that IR doesn’t have to actually HEAT the ocean surface. All it needs to do is stop it from cooling down quite so much at night.

Consider a swimming pool on a cold clear night after a hot day. The water is cooling rapidly due to radiation of heat to space. If you stand next to the pool and hold your hands over it you can actually feel the heat radiating from the water. There is also associated convection going on. Not too much evaporation is happening under these conditions but yes there is a little bit of that too. Now suppose there is a low cloud cover so that the sky isn’t as cold when viewed from the earth. That is another way of saying that there is some backscattered IR coming from those clouds. The pool will not cool as rapidly in those conditions. And that is all that you need to achieve a warming effect.

There was never any question that all sorts of factors will affect the rate of COOLING of our body of water (ocean or swimming pool).

The point under discussion is how the “extra” heat in the atmosphere (generated by man-made CO2 induced atmospheric warming) somehow “disappears” into the body of water (ocean or swimming pool).

Simply explain how your swimming pool in the above example gets warmer overnight, “cooling” the atmosphere above it in the process, and you’ll at least be discussing the same subject as the rest of us.

You are sounding very much like a sky dragon again. The pool doesn’t have to actually get warmer overnight. What a bizarre idea. It just has to not cool down so much. Not cooling down so much means it ends up at the end of the night being warmer than if it had cooled down more – yes? And why on earth should heat have to transfer from the atmosphere to the ocean. That isn’t the question at all. The ocean is heated by the sun and cooled by the atmosphere. If the atmosphere doesn’t cool it quite so efficiently the result will be that the ocean will grow warmer over time. It seems to me like you are linking heat to temperature in a bit of an odd way.

And why on earth should heat have to transfer from the atmosphere to the ocean. That isn’t the question at all.

I’m beginning to think that you and Andrew have the attention span of gnats. The question of “why the heat has to transfer from the atmosphere to the ocean” is because that is PRECISELY what the climastrologists claim is happening.

The fact that it isn’t happening, and is impossible, was the whole point of my original post at #4 above.

At a recent post at #4.1.1.1.1 above, I have included quotes by some of our leading climastrologists. They are quite clearly claiming that the “missing heat” is being transferred FROM the atmosphere, TO the ocean, thereby heating said oceans.

Yes well you would wouldn’t you. However science isn’t about people or motives. It is about the nature of reality. And the reality is that I’m right and you are talking utter nonsense.

My motives or credentials as a sceptic are completely unimportant. However I AM a sceptic. And I am motivated to speak up here because I am getting sick of people like you spreading complete and utter drivel around sceptical forums. The rest of us get contaminated by association with this nonsense. I’ve had enough.

I’m not going to let nonsense pass without challenge. You want to criticise scientists then behave like a proper scientist. Either defend your ideas properly or man up and admit that you were wrong. If you can’t do that then I’d be very happy if you just got lost.

I don’t care if some of you feel I am being a bit rough here and have hurt people’s feelings. I care deeply about the TRUTH. I am a REAL scientist, not a climate scientist. I have the shiny certificate hanging on my office wall to prove it and everything. And anyone who thinks they can get away with making silly statements or playing fast and loose with the laws of physics around me is going to get challenged.

Yes there are scientists who are sceptical. I am one of them. And people spouting nonsense in the ranks of the climate sceptics is the LAST thing we need. You want scientists in the ranks of the sceptics? You’ve got some! Just don’t expect us to tolerate nonsense.

The subject is heat getting into the ocean. The original post in this particular sequence was fine. However it seemed to suggest that because IR could only penetrate a very small distance into the water it couldn’t have much effect. It can and I wanted to show how. IR not being able to heat water is a false meme that is being spread around at the moment.

As to 5.1.1.1, I’ve been arguing with Nunov elsewhere in the thread. Parts of that argument carried across here which is why it may have seemed somewhat out of context.

I think the more important question is: “Why didn’t the pool get warmer during the second day?”.

Why is it so?

Well if you want to go there then yes actually, it probably would end up slightly warmer the next day, and very slightly warmer the day after, and so on until it reached a new slightly warmer equilibrium. But it isn’t going to go on getting warmer and warmer each day. Why not? Being warmer makes it cool quicker at night. It will reach an equilibrium where this effect exactly balances the extra backradiation from the clouds.

I have been back over a lot of the preamble to these last comments and all I can say is I am amazed.
All I see is two people arguing but in your defense I must admit that my wife and I also argue over nothing as well.

Maybe you had help from Andrew McRae ; I think I may have had a disagreement with him in the past.

Actually you’re partly right, in hindsight I can’t believe I had so much argument with Themm as it was based on a misunderstanding of his main point, not helped by his strange way of saying it.
He kept wanting me to argue something that I know to be physically impossible, just because Braganza said it. Actually I’d rather know how the climate works than get pigeonholed into “taking sides”.

Am I right when I calculate that each ARGO buoy has 500,000 cubic km of sea water to monitor?
I can’t see how they can claim anything like the precision of the instrument for this measure, let alone a reduced fraction of it.

The conversion to Joules is done simply because they know that if they showed Temperature in Celsius even the most credulous plank would realise that 0,02C is nothing to get excited about. But 10e22 Joules!! Oooo! That is a BIG NUMBER.
Another standard unit of ocean warming is ‘Hiroshima bombs per second’.
Anything dramatic to distract from the reality of immeasurably small temperature changes.

If we were being very kind to the government, we might describe the statement that “carbon dioxide is a pollutant” as a very “forward-looking statement”.

Extrapolating the 20th century exponential curve of CO2 indefinitely into the future, it seems CO2 would reach 100,000ppmv around 2336 AD. Looking forward 323 years eh, phwoarrr that’s central planning for you!

The level has never naturally exceeded 4000ppm as far as we can tell. If the warministas know exactly where there’s enough coal, oil, and gas to be able to reach even 4000ppm then there’s a dozen energy resources companies that would like to have them on the payroll. 4000ppm is a 3600ppm boost which requires burning (3600ppmCO2 * 2.13GtC/ppmCO2= ) 7668 gigatonnes of carbon which is (7668/639) about twelve times more fossil fuels than were in proven reserves in 2005. Including unconventional deposits only brings the requirement down to about 5 times known deposits. Not gonna happen.

Ah but what about acidification? (Sorry I meant basicity reduction.) Well Tans 2009 has already done the numbers, and if we burned all conventional and unconventional known deposits at projected rates, we will still only lower ocean by -0.30 pH units below its year 1850 value. To put that in a natural context, the difference in average pH between the North Indian ocean and the Arctic today is already -0.16 pH. In short term lab tests of -0.3 pH reduction about half of tested marine species suffer and half of them improve. As longtime Jonovians may recall, some coral species given a rapid -0.3 pH reduction fully adapted to it within just 6 months, so a -0.3 drop spread over 90 years should not pose a problem for them.

Not only is CO2 not a pollutant at current levels, we don’t have enough fossil fuels to ever make it a pollutant, and the adaptability of many marine organisms has been underestimated.

Effectively the log effect is pretty much over as the air is saturated with enough CO2 to pull all of the ground origin IR out by somewhere between 30 and 100 metres altitude. …
Adding more CO2 simply means that this “extraction” of energy will happen between 25 and 95 metres .

By the exponential form of the Beer-Lambert Law the extraction band will not just shift lower with the width staying constant, the band will shrink in width. If the energy extracted after the CO2 doubling is endemic to a smaller volume of air than before then the energy density of that volume has increased, and by the definition of Temperature in kinetic theory of gases, it is therefore now hotter as a result of the CO2 doubling. Probably hotter by an amount too small to measure given that 15um is the only card CO2 can play when surrounded by water vapour.

“100,000ppmv around 2336 AD.” would probably bring that down to 5 to 10 metres.

Yes exactly, a shrinkage of the extraction band width is closer to what you’d expect from the higher concentration of absorbers. And therefore a higher surface temperature.

Point is: adding more CO2 has effectively NO IMPACT on world temperatures even if it was doubled

Quite possibly… “effectively”.

Anyhow, where did you see this 30 to 100m figure? Where can I read more about that?
I am most intrigued.

Sorry, the smaller figures were made up guesstimates for illustrative purposes only.

I have seem somewhere that the 30 metre figure was relevant, but then someone on here last week quoted 100 metres.

I think the main point is that IF this absorption mechanism was important then the warmers are getting away with murder because it just can’t work; we are already up against the asymptotic part of the CO2 vs temp curve.

To be fair to the warmers an increase in CO2 will theoretically cause a very small and tiny increase in Temperature.

Something like 0.0000000000001 C degrees increase.

Prepare to be incinerated.

It might be obvious that I don’t have any interest in discussing things like “Doubling gives 0.5 C extra”.

It might be obvious that I don’t have any interest in discussing things like “Doubling gives 0.5 C extra”.
Doubling might give 0.000000001 extra.

Well that’s just coded talk for zero. There is no calculation behind that so what you’re implying is that it is zero. You just don’t want to be the one to tell me that it’s zero, heheh.
Well there are some saying it is 0.4 per doubling. That is a long way from zero and it wouldn’t be bad in the slightest. If anything that would move the debate about impact from warming to ocean basicity reduction.

What’s also bizarre is how crazy it becomes when you wind the clock back. If we removed all the CO2, that’s infinite halvings, so does that mean the world would cool infinitely?
Like all models a simple logarithmic formula has its limits. I just wonder how far it can be stretched before it breaks, if it hasn’t already.

No I don’t want to be the one to say there is zero correlation between Man’s CO2 output and world atmospherics temperatures.

Why should I stick my neck on a chopping block.

The whole MMGWCAGW concept is just so scientifically stupid that it is totally legless and yet it keeps on walking.

You have to admit though it is a wonderful piece of political population entrainment; I have mental images of large cattle yards with high, heavy railed fences that squeeze the cattle down to single file for their last moments.

As to CO2 and life, well we are at the lowest long term CO2 levels seen in hundreds of millions of years but on a scale relevant to human existence, say the last 800,000 years we are about top of average levels and no more.

Nothing aberrant.

Humans can survive and exist in places where CO2 levels may be 8,000 or more.

Submarines and crowded theaters are proof of this.

On the other hand, at the other extreme as you say : “Except to add hastily that removing all the CO2 would be a very suicidal idea.:

Without CO2 we could not survive more than 20 minutes.

The last thing that a dying person does is to commence Cheyne-Stokes breathing pattern which is a long slow intake of breath followed by a short sharp exhalation.

What this does is to ensure the lungs have a new supply of 02 entering for most of the breath cycle with a commensurate reduction in CO2 levels in the blood stream.

When the level of CO2 in the bloodstream gets too low the neural response to breathe is no longer activated.

That’s it. Gorey, but the point is excess CO2 is not harmful whereas low levels of CO2 are fatal.

People who have inadvertently used pure oxygen breathing apparatus have found this to be so.

But the CO2 thing is a Political Monster. The question is how do you euthanase it?

and he says: “The absorption length for the existing concentration of CO2 is around 25 meters i.e. the distance to reduce the intensity by 1/e. All agree that direct IR radiation in the main CO2 bands is absorbed well below 1 km above the earth. Increasing levels of CO2 merely cause the absorption length to move closer to the surface. Doubling the amount of CO2 does not double the amount of global warming. Any increase could be at most logarithmic, and this is also generally agreed by all sides.”

Other material is at this site but I haven’t read it ; still it has lots of good graphs.

And the same trick is done with ice melt is well. This is measured in billion tonnes, or GT-1. In volume, that is a cubic kilometre. That is the volume of Lake Windermere, the biggest lake in England. You need about 360 of these cubes to raise the sea level by just one millimetre. It is then you realise how vast the oceans are.

On average there is one Argo buoy per 320km x 320km, or 102,400 square kilometres. Average depth as above in article, 3.6km, therefore on average each Argo buoy is sitting somewhere in 368,640 cubic kilometres of water.

• The sampling of the oceans is by no means as uniform as I had expected. Part of the ocean is undersampled, sometimes badly so, compared to other areas. Half of the global ocean has been sampled less than 20 times per 10,000 sq. km, and 14% has never been sampled by Argo floats at all.

It is not possible to warm the deep oceans (below the thermocline) from above in significant numbers. Warm(er) water DOES NOT SINK into cold(er)water.
The sun warms the first 100-200 meter directly (including the effect of mixing by waves and currents). The thermocline is warmed by conduction, but this warmed water wants to RISE, hence the rather steep temperature drop in the thermocline.
The idea that a few CO2 molecules can warm the deep oceans is just crazy.

For the real reason the oceans have the temperature they have today see this article.
50 million years ago the deep oceans were ~14 WHOLE degrees warmer than today. No Greenhouse effect involved, just the eruption of over 100.000.000 km^3 magma into the oceans. (that’s enough magma to cover the whole USA and Canada under ~5km magma)

With the temperature of the deep oceans explained, all the sun is doing is warm the surface layer from ~275K to ~290K. The oceans surface warms the atmosphere, which slows the cooling of the surface somewhat, like air is known to do. No greenhouse effect, backradiation or other nonsense needed.

Astute comment Eddy. If truly there, the heat would have had to be finding it’s way to the deep much faster and earlier if human co2 were the cause. Surely this means the atmosphere would have to be much warmer than it is.

Is there a huge body of ice somewhere whose temperature has risen to melting point. Ice melting would absorb a lot of heat, without raising the temperature. But that must be insignificant in the scale of things, because not even warmists are suggesting it .

Why is there missing heat in the first place? The world works the way it works. And if someone calculates a lot of heat but no one can find it, guess what? The first suspect to round up and question is the assumption that there’s missing heat.

Does that make sense to anyone? Or am I a basket case who can’t understand ordinary every day grammar school logical thinking?

If we can just conjure up a consensus, showing that say 97% of top experts agree that the missing heat must exist, then all necessary measures can be justified to round up those lying deniers and force them to tell where they’ve hidden it.The Missing Heat

It was explained to me that energy has to go somewhere and there has to be a balance of in and out. LIke a monetary budget–you earn so much and you spend it, save it or whatever. Every penny coming in has to be accounted for. If you cant’ balance the books, you have to keep searching until you find where the balance is off.

I do have some difficulty in relating to the earth’s energy as being balanced like a check book, but nature and physics do require balance. This theory of the oceans holding heat has been around for quite a while. None of this proves AGW or CAGW. There is always a chance that “accounts” have been missed or the amounts in each account recorded incorrectly. Jumping to ocean heat as the reason for the stopping of the atmosphere warming is an attempt to hang on to the climate change theories without considering a mechanism (account) may have been missed or the balances for each account may have been wrong in the first place. It’s an attempt to discourage people from asking too many questions about the bookkeeping system in climate change science.

I don’t think any climatologist is in a position to do a complete energy balance on the Earth.

There are so many considerations that looking at those energy balances put out in diagram form where every thing balances nicely to zero, well they just have to be a joke.

Work is energy and no count of that aspect of the budget has ever been mentioned let alone done.

One small example.

All clouds started out life as water at ground level. They are lifted and energy is expended doing that. Most people would see clouds as soft fluffy things but the amount of water in them is stupendous.

If you hold your thumb out at arms length while looking at a cloud bank and imagine the area of cloud behind the tip of your thumb.

Done that. Imagine that is a cube of cloud.

Depending on height and distance to the cloud, that cube may hold from 5 to 20 tonnes of water. All of that has been lifted from ground level. Energy has been expended that can be subtracted from energy available to create heat.

look at the amount of water in the sky; tens of thousands of tonnes. The Earth is a big complex system. So much for accurate energy balances.

I’ve been wondering if anyone would ever notice that some of the incoming heat will be doing work, thus disappearing as heat in the process. On the other hand, when that cloud in your example condenses back into water and falls to the ground do we get all that heat back? Probably we do.

I imagine the amount of work done by UV in the form of chemical changes in whatever it strikes must be substantial. And IR can do the same thing but probably slower.

I have no idea how to figure any of these things.

But back to my original comment — if you can’t find all that missing heat, especially after so many years and so many experts looking for it, then maybe, just barely maybe, the assumption is wrong in the first place.

Of course, if at first you don’t succeed then you must never examine your premise, just go full speed ahead and redouble your efforts. After all, I think perpetual employment for climate scientists is the real goal here.

: “when that cloud in your example condenses back into water and falls to the ground do we get all that heat back? Probably we do.”

Had thought about that but decided to just make a point.

I didn’t give the whole thing a lot of effort – about the same effort as was given by warmers who originally put up these “balances” for our mystification.

When clouds condense back to water they give up the Latent Heat of Vaporisation at that altitude and the radiant energy is closer to top of atmosphere to pass to that great heat sink in the sky: Space. The cycle of evaporation and condensation does take energy from ground level and pump heat higher in the atmosphere.

“….The crux of the matter is the claim that ARGO errors are reduced because there are so many samples. This would be true if ARGO buoys were independent observations of the same quantity, ….”
>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>FINALLY some one is addressing the crux of the matter. ALL temperature data whether it is in the ocean or the atmosphere is measuring different populations so the error is for a sample size of ONE.

All the hocus pocus with number manipulation can not get around the fact that neither the atmosphere nor the ocean are homogeneous.

Add to that the fact that each measurement from the ARGO buoy is taken as representative of a volume of ocean. In my estimate half a million cubic km per buoy. How do we calculate the average temperature of that volume from one measurement? How do we estimate error bars?

I agree that “oversampling” and averaging can only reduce errors so far. I just completed an electronic design that employed massive oversampling (20 million per second to use at 20 thousand per second), and while it did help to compensate for electronic noise, it in no way came close to the theoretical limit for reducing total inaccuracies, because there were other sources of systematic error.

Second, is there any good analysis anywhere of the comparison of data from different sources through the transitions, e.g. XBT to Argo. I and others have often wondered about the rapid jump at the transition to Argo, followed by a basically flat trend through the Argo era.

Roy Hogue:

I don’t have a problem with the concept of “searching for the missing heat”. Yes, “the world works the way it works”. But if we want to understand how this crazy world works, we must come up with an explanation that makes sense that matches our best observations. It is fundamentally a test of our explanation (which could be wrong, of course).

I like to think of energy balance analysis as akin to financial accounting, where you have to note all of the income and expenses, with the difference being the change in the balance. Whether it is you balancing your personal checkbook, or a corporation’s accountants trying to make its books balance for the owners and the tax man, you can be “searching for the missing money”. Imagine you had a new small income stream into your account, but your accounting didn’t show the expected effect on your account balance. Wouldn’t you be “searching for the missing heat (aka money)”?

I don’t have a problem with the concept of “searching for the missing heat”. Yes, “the world works the way it works”. But if we want to understand how this crazy world works, we must come up with an explanation that makes sense that matches our best observations.

My young granddaughter is still looking for the fairies at the bottom of her garden. One day she will come to the realisation that she cannot find them because there aren’t any. This will be the simplest explanation that best matches her observations.

The so-called “missing heat” is the amount calculated by assuming CO2 “heats” the atmosphere – the inappropriately-named “CO2 Greenhouse Effect”. The simplest explanation which best matches our observations is that there IS NO such effect (or it is so small as to be non-measurable), and there simply ISN’T any heat to go missing.

For my young granddaughter to expend her time and energy looking for something that simply doesn’t exist, is cute. For grown men and women to expend twenty years and billions of other people’s money doing it borders somewhere between criminal fraud, and insanity.

No, there is a total heat imbalance of about 150 W/m2 that cannot be explained without the (badly named) greenhouse effect or its equivalent. The missing heat that Trenberth is looking for is about 1 W/m2, from expected enhancement to the greenhouse effect from added CO2.

I think that our measurements are not good enough to resolve this definitively, but there is a very good chance that it is radiated out to space much more effectively than the mainstream models predict.

I don’t have a problem with the concept of “searching for the missing heat”. Yes, “the world works the way it works”. But if we want to understand how this crazy world works, we must come up with an explanation that makes sense that matches our best observations. It is fundamentally a test of our explanation (which could be wrong, of course).

I would say I have no problem with trying to figure out how the world really works. But it’s pretty clear that the people making the claim for so much missing heat are also working a scam of unprecedented magnitude on the rest of us. There’s that “little” matter of trustworthiness that’s been ignored for far too long. Remember, it’s some computer model that thinks there’s missing heat. Not actual observation.

My bottom line about all this — I think they’ve called their own bluff. They don’t have the cards. They’ve never had the cards. They’re broke and in the hole to the tune of billions. We need to kick them out of the game and let some wiser players sit down at the table. If this was a real poker game they’d be getting visits from enforcers who’d break a few legs until they pay back the debt they so foolishly ran up.

Having said all that I expect we’ll keep right on letting them play on credit forever.

some of my favorite graphs that show it is the SUN that warms the ocean and ‘back radiation’ from CO2 can not even penetrate beyond a couple of molecules in depth.

This graph shows it is the short wavelengths, visible and UV, that penetrate the ocean and not infrared. This graph is a closer look at wave length vs depth. This graph is the absorption co-efficient.

And this graph is the real killer. It shows the amount of ENERGY in the UV/Visible wavelengths that are penetrating the ocean vs the energy in Earthshine. It is like comparing pennies (CO2) to billions of dollars(the sun.)

Yes the sun is very efficient at heating the water and the energy from the sun can penetrate the water to some depth. Consequently during the day the ocean heats up. But during the night it cools down again by pretty much exactly the same amount that it warmed. So think for a minute about exactly how the ocean cools at night. Evaporation is part of it, but a big chunk of it is radiation of heat to space. Only a very thin surface layer of the water can radiate since as you correctly point out IR doesn’t penetrate through water. But that thin surface layer which CAN radiate IR to space does precisely that. And as it radiates it cools rapidly, and as it cools it sinks. Convection sets in and warmer water is brought to the surface which radiates and cools in turn. This overturning process goes on all night and undoes every bit of the heating caused by the sun which happened during the day.

You are correct that you cannot HEAT water from above with IR because to do that you’d need to bring cooler water to the surface which would require convection to run backwards. Convection acts like a ratchet which prevents IR from ever making the temperature go up.
IR can only ever make the temperature go down. But incoming IR at the surface can be very effective at slowing the rate at which it goes down. IR backscatter doesn’t have to HEAT the water. It just has to slow the rate at which that thin top layer cools at night. That stops the ocean from cooling down so much. If the ocean doesn’t cool so quickly at night then over time it will warm up.

Consequently during the day the ocean heats up. But during the night it cools down again by pretty much exactly the same amount that it warmed.

If you actually believe that, I suggest you stop commenting, and go back to high school for a few years.

Failing that, you might like to explain the existence of the great ocean thermal currents that, together with the slipstream air currents, determine our global weather patterns, in your strange little world where the oceans lose their accumulated heat overnight.

Visible light from the Sun can’t heat matter, it’s in the wrong scale.

The AGWScienceFiction’s Greenhouse Effect Illusion does not have the Sun’s direct radiant heat, thermal infrared aka longwave infrared. This is the Sun’s thermal energy in transfer by radiation (conduction and convection being the others in heat transfer).

This is the biggest con in science, it has infiltrated the education system and is complete gobbledegook.

The KT97 and kin is nonsense science. To get the “backradiation from greenhouse gases in atmosphere” they had to take out the direct heat from the Sun.

There are two versions of why this doesn’t get past TOA, the first is from CAGW and says there is some “invisible barrier like the glass of a greenhouse preventing longwave infrared from entering”, and the second is from AGW and says that the Sun produces insignificant amounts of longwave infrared, they have planckian back calculated to the 300 wide atmosphere of visible light around the Sun and established the Sun has a temp of 6,000°C so they say insignificant amounts of longwave infrared produced so insignificant of insignificant reaches Earth.

Now, they can use real measurements of downwelling longwave infrared from the atmosphere and claim it is from “backradiation”.

Well that is a relief. I’m very glad they are not yet teaching complete nonsense in schools.

1. Of course radiation from the sun heats the planet. Frequencies other than IR carry energy and energy converts to heat when absorbed. Higher frequencies actually carry more energy not less.

2. You can directly measure the spectrum of light from the sun, both on earth and in space. This has been done countless times. Nobody is hiding any IR component of solar radiation or attributing it falsely to back scattering.

3. You couldn’t do this anyway since backscattering happens also at night.

4. You can directly see backscattering. Go outside at noght and point a temperature sensor at the sky. If you don’t see 3 degrees Kelvin then you are observing backscatter in action.

Ian H
May 20, 2013 at 9:27 am · “This is still not taught in traditional science..
Well that is a relief. I’m very glad they are not yet teaching complete nonsense in schools.

1. Of course radiation from the sun heats the planet. Frequencies other than IR carry energy and energy converts to heat when absorbed. Higher frequencies actually carry more energy not less.

What they still don’t teach in traditional physics is the AGWScienceFiction meme that “shortwaves from the Sun heat land and water and longwave infrared, aka thermal infrared, doesn’t get through the atmosphere”

Make your point against what I’m actually saying.

It makes no difference if all of you gave thumbs down – a fact is a fact. That’s why in science I don’t have to believe something, take something as an act of faith, and neither should you.

It is physically impossible, physically impossible, for shortwaves from the Sun to heat matter – they are the wrong scale to get whole molecules moving into vibration which is what heat energy does – which is what it takes to heat up matter.

Rub your hands together, that is mechanical energy moving the molecules of your skin into vibration, heating up your skin. This is what heat energy from the Sun does – and AGWSF has excised this completely from the fantasy world of the Greenhouse Effect Illusion.

You do not have the direct heat from the Sun which is the Sun’s thermal energy in transfer by radiation. This is longwave infrared and called thermal infrared to differentiate it from shortwave infrared which is not thermal, which is not hot, we cannot feel these shortwaves as heat.

Thermal means “of heat”. Longwave infrared is called thermal because it is the wavelengths of heat, shortwave infrared are not thermal they are classed in with Reflective not Thermal because they are Light not Heat.

We get both from the Sun, this is what traditional physics still teaches, but not in the general education system, so you work out why you have been taught a fiction..

..and this goes all the way up now, it’s been in the system for longer than a generation to university level and the once traditional science bodies are also teaching it, including NASA which used to teach traditional physics on this:

NASA:

Infrared light lies between the visible and microwave portions of the electromagnetic spectrum. Infrared light has a range of wavelengths, just like visible light has wavelengths that range from red light to violet. “Near infrared” light is closest in wavelength to visible light and “far infrared” is closer to the microwave region of the electromagnetic spectrum. The longer, far infrared wavelengths are about the size of a pin head and the shorter, near infrared ones are the size of cells, or are microscopic.

Far infrared waves are thermal. In other words, we experience this type of infrared radiation every day in the form of heat! The heat that we feel from sunlight, a fire, a radiator or a warm sidewalk is infrared. The temperature-sensitive nerve endings in our skin can detect the difference between inside body temperature and outside skin temperature

Shorter, near infrared waves are not hot at all – in fact you cannot even feel them. These shorter wavelengths are the ones used by your TV’s remote control.

The heat we feel from the Sun is longwave infrared is a fact. So it is a lie, a deliberate science fraud, that this doesn’t get through Top of Atmosphere (TOA).

AGWSF does everything it can to distract from the fact that heat is hot, it introduces memes to downplay this so it can push the fraud that “visible energy creates heat because it is more energetic”. It can’t.

Visible light works on the electronic transition level not on the molecular vibrational level, because it is much tinier than longwave infrared, radiant heat.

It takes the bigger more powerful energy of radiant heat to move molecules into vibration just as the bigger more powerful mechanical energy of friction moves the molecules of your skin.

Visible light energy is not converted into heat – that is a science fraud meme from AGWSF.

In the sky the visible light from the Sun is absorbed by the electrons of the molecules of nitrogen and oxygen, (electronic transition), this moves the electron, enegises it, and when the electron comes back to ground state it emits the same visible light wavelength it absorbed – this is how we get reflection/scattering and why the sky is blue. Blue visible light is more energetic, so it gets bounced around more by the electrons..

It is the technical explanation of how we get reflection/scattering. This is not converting visible light to heat, but to movement, reflection/scattering.

Visible light does not create heat in photosynthesis, this is conversion to chemical energy, not heat energy in the creation of sugars.

Thermal panels capturing the direct radiant heat from the Sun which is thermal infrared which is direct longwave from the Sun heating the water in the panels.

Visible light from the Sun can’t heat water directly. Water is a transparent medium for visible light and it is transmitted through unchanged. It is not absorbed at all, not even by the electrons of the water molecules.

Shortwaves from the Sun cannot heat the water of the ocean. AGWSF plays on the technical meaning and general meaning of “absorbed” to make you think the water molecules are actually absorbing the visible energy, they can’t.

AGWSF has confused all this by introducing memes which deliberately hide real information about the differences between Heat and Light – like saying “all things give off longwave infrared heat, even icecubes” – this is a magician’s trick of distraction – you don’t put ice cubes in your hot water bottles to warm your feet..

You won’t see these magicians’ tricks, these sleights of hand, unless you know what the real physical properties and processes are. You won’t even notice they are missing in “descriptions” produced about this anymore than you notice that there is no Water Cycle in the AGWSF’s Greenhouse Effect Illusion, there is no rain in their Carbon Cycle.

Now, if you’re determined to think like scientists then you will take what I have said seriously, these are explanations from traditional physics which is still taught to some. They make sense.

In the real world of applied science there are manufacturers producing glass for windows to cut down on air conditioning costs – they produce glass which takes out the direct longwave infrared heat from the Sun and maximises the entry of visible light. Think about that.

Visible light is not hot, like shortwave infrared these are not hot because they are not hot. We cannot feel them as heat. They are not radiated heat energy. It takes radiated heat energy to move molecules into vibration which is what heats up matter.

It is the direct radiant heat from the Sun which heats up land and water intensely at the equator from which we get our great winds and weather systems. This is what we physically feel as heat.

Visible light cannot do this, visible light cannot physically move the molecules of water and land into vibration which has to be done to get the volumes of air heated above them, transferred first by conduction then convection as the real gases of the fluid ocean above us expand and become less dense and rise and giving up their heat in the colder heights condense becoming heavier and sink. Hot air rises cold air sinks.

Heat energy heats us up. It heats up our skin and it penetrates into us heating up the water in us so raising our internal temperature, that’s why we sweat. Visible light from the Sun cannot do this.

Anyway, if you are taking this seriously and now have a grasp of what traditional science still teaches, then read again the quote I gave from the old NASA page and then compare it with a page from AGWSF’s manipulation of this real physics about the properties and processes of matter and energy at university level, like here:

Think of it like a puzzle to work out how the magic trick has been done, for example:

For example, hot charcoal may not give off light but it does emit infrared which we feel as heat. The warmer the object, the more infrared it emits. We experience infrared radiation every day. The heat that we feel from sunlight, a fire, a radiator or a warm sidewalk is infrared. Although our eyes cannot see it, the nerves in our skin can feel it as heat. The temperature-sensitive nerve endings in your skin can detect the difference between your inside body temperature and your outside skin temperature. We also commonly use infrared rays when we operate a television remote.

You can spot what they have done. But only when you know how it used to be taught..

Remember, AGWSF mixes fact and fiction as a trick to deceive the mind, you as scientists have to work out which is which.

Note, the hotter something is the more heat it emits is how it should have been worded. How hot is the Sun?

If you’re calculating that as AGWSF teaches you to calculate by the sleight of hand planckian graphic that the 300 mile wide visible layer atmosphere around the Sun defines its heat, then you get the fake fisics meme of 6,000°C.

Do you really think that is credible as the temperature of the Sun?

That’s why AGW teaches the Sun doesn’t give off any heat, any longwave infrared. Makes sense doesn’t it? If the Sun is only 6,000°C and it is 93 million miles away..

We can feel this invisible heat direct from the Sun 93 million miles away, just like we feel the invisible heat from the camp fire.

That is what radiated heat energy is, invisible heat, not light.

Now, look at the figures they give for the Sun’s energy at TOA in KT97 and ilk – AGWSF has given the total amount of energy which includes the great heat radiation of longwave infrared to shortwaves only. This is the science fraud so they can pretend that any downwelling measured from the atmosphere comes from “backradiation”, when they are actually including the direct longwave infrared heat from the Sun.

AGWSF’s Greenhouse Effect is an Illusion, created from clever and subtle magicians’ tricks, they are not easy to spot.

What it has created is a different world, a different Earth and a different Sun.

There is no direct heat from the Sun in this fantasy magic world and visible light/shortwaves either side cannot heat up matter -

you have no heat at all in your AGWScienceFiction world.

If this doesn’t bother you, generic, as people interested in science it should.

Myrrh, I remember reading about an experiment where sunlight was split through a prism to obtain the ‘rainbow’ and a thermometer recorded a different temperature in each colour band. There is indeed ‘heat energy’ in visible light, but then the total bandwidth is less than half a micron and the UV band is even narrower, but still enough energy, even through cloud, to give you a good dose of sunburn.

Myrrh, I remember reading about an experiment where sunlight was split through a prism to obtain the ‘rainbow’ and a thermometer recorded a different temperature in each colour band. There is indeed ‘heat energy’ in visible light, but then the total bandwidth is less than half a micron and the UV band is even narrower, but still enough energy, even through cloud, to give you a good dose of sunburn.

It’s uv which gives us sunburn, and that is not because it is physically moving the molecules of our skin into vibration, but because it is scrambling our dna, more on that later in this post.

The Herschel experiment was the first crude step to understanding that the heat energy we feel from the Sun is invisible, brilliant but crude. They make you repeat it at schools teaching the AGWScienceFiction memes to confuse you, because the measurements are crude you cannot tell that the visible light isn’t carrying any heat – it’s the overlap from the bigger longwave infrared that is spilling over into the visible light measurements which you are reading..

This is a trick, a science fraud scam explanation to make you believe what they want you to believe by misdirection.

I’ve just posted a piece to Ian H, it hasn’t appear yet and I’m not into ad homs, where I show the traditional teaching on this, that shortwave infrared is not hot.

That’s why now that we have better measurements, we differentiate between shortwave and longwave infrared by calling the longwaves of heat, thermal. Shortwaves are classed in with Light, not Heat.

Visible light and shortwave infrared are not heat energy, the shortwave infrared is classed in with Reflective and not Thermal because it is of the same properties as light, that’s the infrared used in cameras which work on the same principle as visible light cameras – they capture the shortwave infrared reflected back from the subject. Longwave infrared, thermal infrared, is absorbed by matter, it doesn’t reflect back out (as general principle, some materials reflect it which is how glass can be made for windows to reflect back radiant heat longwave infrared and let in visible light to save on airconditioning costs..).

The infrared “cameras” measuring thermal radiation from bodies is not working on the camera principle of capturing reflection, they capture the heat emitted from a subject. As used in heat seeking missiles.

Descriptios of UV use the word “burn” in a general sense, but that’s not actually what is happening, the skin does not become hotter.

UV’s energy is more energetic and smaller than visible, it works on the DNA level and the body protects against too much of it by producing melanin, tan, to stop the UV from scrambling the DNA, the darker the skin the more it is protected against too much UV.. Same as a simple way of making water fit to drink in places like Africa where there is a lot of Sun is to put it into a bottle and leave it out for a few hours, the uv damages the DNA of any microbes and destroys their ability to reproduce.

Anyway, skin “burns” is skin being scrambled by uv when melanin production can’t keep pace, so acclimatising slowly is the best way of protection. Slathering on uv barrier creams will also stop uv from converting to vitamin D.. There have been growing numbers of cases of rickets reported in the West, practically unknown since the world wars, because children are being sent out smothered against a northern Sun which is why we have white skins in this area – we adapted to the smaller amounts of uv available when we moved out of Africa.

There’s a lot of misinformation about uv being dangerous for health, burning and cancer, so be aware of that, this has been overhyped to benefit the pharmaceutical industry and medical “research”. To get a sense of perspective a good page to start: http://rense.com/general48/sunlight1.htm

Ultraviolet (UV) light is a form of radiation that acts as a mutagen, an agent that causes mutations in DNA. Exposure to ultraviolet light causes chemical changes that alter the shape of your DNA, and the process that corrects DNA’s shape can also cause changes to the DNA code. Sunlight is a strong source of UV light and it can cause damage to the DNA in the surface layer of your skin after repeated or prolonged exposure, ..

Ultraviolet light is radiation in wavelengths from 200 to 300 nm (nautical miles) found in natural sunlight, sun lamps and tanning beds. DNA sucks in UV light like a sponge because the most intense portion of DNA’s absorption spectrum (wavelengths of 250 to 260 nm) complements the peak energy emission of UV light (240 to 280 nm). Because of the UV component of sunlight, UV light is the most common source of DNA-damaging radiation. Fortunately, UV light is a weak form of radiation and it does not penetrate past the surface cells of your skin.

“UV is a weak form of radiation“, it is not powerful because it is “highly energetic”… watch of for AGWScienceFiction twisting words around to push its agenda.

UV doesn’t even get through the first layer of the epidermis, we have three layers to our skin.

Visible light penetrates a little further before being reflected out and longwave infrared penetrates the furthest, radiant heat penetrates to 3/4 inches.

Anyway, shortwaves do not work on the molecular vibrational level, which is what heats matter, heat is the kinetic energy of matter, the movement of molecules.

“Highly energetic” does not mean visible and other shortwaves have the power to move whole molecules, they can’t.

As it stands, the AGWSF fictional world has no heat at all from the Sun..

Mr Steffen, that great climate scientist advising the Government on climate said, “If you look at the temperature change of the oceans, it’s a small number but when you convert it to Joules you realize what huge numbers we are dealing with”

Is it possible to make thermometers which not only have the accuracy and precision to usefully measure using milli-celsius, but also are unaffected by changes in pressure between 1 and 201 atmospheres?

I’m skeptical. That means I don’t tolerate nonsense. You are talking nonsense.

“This unbelievable tripe won’t be killed until people understand that you can’t heat water from above due to surface tension.

Try applying heat from a paint stripping heat gun to the surface of water and you will find that the heat is emphatically rejected.

The problem with trying to heat a body of water by heating the surface is not surface tension. The problem is that you would need to move cooler water from deep down to the surface in order to heat it. This would require convection to work backwards because if you heat the surface water it isn’t going to want to sink.

This is what happened to Trenberth’s missing heat- You cannot store heat in the ocean.

This is going much too far. The oceans store a vast amount of heat. The question is not whether the oceans contain heat because they indisputably do, it is whether the amount of heat that they contain is changing, which is extremely hard to measure.

The only energy to enter the ocean is via radiation not physical heat.

Energy enters the ocean by various means, mostly radiation. And it leaves it by various means including radiation. If more energy enters than leaves over a period of time the ocean will contain more heat. It is the balance that is important. The ocean can be warmed quite effectively by simply slowing the rate at which it cools at night.

I don’t know what you mean by “physical heat”. You seem to have a funny idea of what heat is. Do you imagine that there are actual heat particles which bounce off the surface of the water so that the heat can’t get in?

My B.S. meter went off over the whole heat hidden in the ocean for many of the reasons already mentioned. In particular heat deep in the ocean is far more likely to come from under sea volcanic activity than any hope of the suns heat getting down 700 meters or so. Just think of the mechanism to distribute heat down versus the need for heat to rise.

Is there any chance of being able to isolate Argo measurements near known volcanic activity versus the others?

I think I have some form of expertise in the area I mostly comment at, so I use Posts like this to learn stuff, or perhaps to better understand it, and if and when I do leave comments at Posts like this, I show my knowledge as a novice, so perhaps someone might help me out here.

What I can’t see is how heat is supposed to be able to do two seemingly opposite things.

Now we all know that hot air rises, well I suppose it does, because this theory of the warmists seems to suggest otherwise.

Have you noticed how (similar to the Scarlet Pimpernel) they seek that missing heat here and there, and, evidently, it seems to be at the outer extremities.

First, it’s way way up there in the upper farawayasphere hiding somewhere, and now, when they can’t seem to locate it there, all of a sudden it’s in the downthereasphere hiding at the bottom of the oceans.

Why is that?

Let’s pretend for a minute that CO2 is the culprit.

We’re told ad imfinitum that CO2, even though heavier than air, rises and stays up there, causing heating which also rises.

Yet, almost with the same breath, CO2 now sinks into the deep oceans. If that CO2 sinks through a mass like water, then why does it magically float in the air, in fact, rising. If it does sink through the mass of water, then that CO2 in the air should just drop like a stone to the surface of the Planet.

Perhaps I should just stick to the electrical power side of things eh!

Ignoring the first two years of Argo data, the warming trend is about 0.004C/yr, while the (noted) IPCC prediction is .007C/yr. Assuming IPCC processes of heat distribution subsequent to warming due to CO2 are correct, observations indicate that the actual warming influence of CO2 is 4/7th of IPCC base assumptions.

Oceanic heat/temperature histories show radiative heating power of CO2 to be, therefore, 1.7C/2X CO2, based on their prior figure of 3.0/doubling CO2.

“The crux of the matter is the claim that ARGO errors are reduced because
there are so many samples. This would be true if ARGO buoys were independent
observations of the same quantity, that is, independent samples drawn on the
same population.”

David is correct to say that:

“[it is] erroneous to suggest that the estimate of the global average ocean
temperature is given by the instrument accuracy divided by the square root
of the number of observations (as you would if the observations were of the
same quantity).”

However, there is some subtlety here that needs to be considered.

Let’s take an example where you measure the length of desk top (i.e. a single quantity).
If you measured it once, you would get a series of errors that would include
random and systematic errors (amongst others):

a) a random component of the instrumental error (~ +/- half the limit of reading)
b) parallax error – which is systematic error
c) a systematic component of the instrumental error e.g. the zero error on the ruler.

If you were plot the random component of the instrumental error, you would
generally find that it would have a Gaussian distribution about some mean
value (that will also still include a error component due to systematic errors).
The width of this Gaussian distribution would be indicative of the random component
of the instrumental error.

Increasing the number of measurements in this case, does decrease the random
component of the instrumental error by 1/SQRT(n) where n is the the number of
observations.

Next, consider measuring the average temperature in a room, where the temperature
is relatively uniform. Again, because of the uniform nature of the temperature,
a series of n observations taken at various points around the room will have an
error that is 1/SQRT(n) smaller than a single measurement alone. Hence, it possible
for a large number of measurements at different locations to result in a meaningful
reduction in the level of error of a quantity, provided that the value of the quantity
does not vary much across the sample space.

Of course, this is not true of mean ocean heat capacity nor the world’s mean temperature,
however it may be substantial true over a 5 x 5 degree section of ocean or even a region
as large as a single ocean basin.

The advantage of error reduction that comes from multiple sampling begins to degrade when
the “single” quantity being measured produces a set of random errors that has a Gaussian
distribution about the mean that is significantly broadened by regional or spatial
variations of the mean over the sample space.

These are readings all within 15 miles of my closest weather station. I do not consider a range of 64 °F (17.7 °C) to 67.1 °F (19.5 °C) as relatively uniform when the headlines are screaming about a change of +0.10°C or even +0.01°C.

This link is not about sea temperatures, but about observed sea level rise, with a pinch of history:
.

“Five copper coins and a nearly 70-year-old map with an ‘‘X’’ might lead to a discovery that could rewrite Australia’s history.

The scientist wants to revisit the location where five coins were found in the Northern Territory in 1944 that have proven to be 1000 years old, opening up the possibility that seafarers from distant countries might have landed in Australia much earlier than what is currently believed.

Australian soldier Maurie Isenberg was stationed on one of the islands to man a radar station and spent his spare time fishing on the idyllic beaches.
While sitting in the sand with his fishing-rod, he discovered a handful of coins in the sand.

The coins proved to be 1000 years old.
Still not fully realising what treasure he held in his hands, he marked an old colleague’s map with an ‘‘X’’ to remember where he had found them.”
.
Obviously the sea levels have not risen much in 1000 years if the lost coins were so easily found in same spot.
.Ancient discovery set to rewrite Australian history

Many examples of earlier Europeans here, Muckaty Station NT (Musket) named by indigenous people. NZ Maori claims that white skin red haired people came from the west and were there when Maori arrived. Look at rock art in Australia depicting strange people drawings.

And for the adventurous Google ancient gold mines in africa, civilisation 200,000 years ago, and for Tony electricity capture in ancient times.

Golly gosh, I can feel all the extra 0.02 degrees from here, 100 km. from the ocean. Guess we won’t need to cook the fish any more, they come pre-cooked.What to do about sushi and sashimi. A nice little grant should see me right for a study trip to Japan to gauge how well they are coping. Kevin please send money, I’ll let you know how I get on.

“…..The notion that a tool – an RCM – may possess shortcomings in its predictive skill, but simultaneously prove to be a valuable tool to support narratives that are relevant to policy making and spatial planning can in fact be extended to highlighting the difference between “climate predictions” and “climate scenarios….”

TRANSLATION
We know the computer models aren’t worth a pile of bovine feces and can not predict the climate at all but they are a great propaganda tool for scaring people into doing what we want – giving up their land, transportation, freedom, and wealth and moving into overcrowded cities to live in little micro-mini apartments so they are even more vulnerable to control by the bog corporations that provide not only jobs but food and every other necessity of life.

Monsanto and buddies are already patenting seeds and outlawing seed saving. With the UN’s blessing: FAO is supporting harmonization of seed rules and regulations in Africa and Central Asia in order to stimulate the development of a vibrant seed industry

…In recent years, the harmonization of seed rules and regulations has been a major area of FAO’s work …An effective seed regulation harmonization process involves dialogue amongst all relevant stakeholders from both private and public sectors. Seed quality assurance, variety release, plant variety protection, biosafety, plant quarantine and phytosanitary issues are among the major technical areas of a regional harmonized seed system. The key to a successful seed regulation harmonization is a strong political will of the governments involved… http://www.fao.org/ag/portal/agp/agp-news/detail/en/c/5730/

The Patenting Sentinel and Action Service (PSAS) is an important initiative of the International Committee for Animal Recording (ICAR) as regards patenting in the animal sector. This is an issue which is of uttermost importance for the future of all organizations involved in the sectors of animal recording and genetic evaluation….

The Socialist Revolution in the US cannot take place because there are too many small independent farmers there. Those people are the stability factor. We here in Russia must hurry while our government is stupid enough to not encourage and support the independent farmership.’ ~ V. Lenin, the founder of the Russian revolution

Any who think governments will not kill their own citizens should read DEATH BY GOVERNMENT By R.J. Rummel
169,202,000 were murdered by their own government in the 20th century while over 133,147,000 were Murdered in Pre-Twentieth Century Democide.

After eight-years and almost daily reading and recording of men, women, and children by the tens of millions being tortured or beaten to death, hung, shot, and buried alive, burned or starved to death, stabbed or chopped into pieces, and murdered in all the other ways creative and imaginative human beings can devise, I have never been so happy to conclude a project. I have not found it easy to read time and time again about the horrors innocent people have been forced to suffer. What has kept me at this was the belief, as preliminary research seemed to suggest, that there was a positive solution to all this killing and a clear course of political action and policy to end it. And the results verify this. The problem is Power. The solution is democracy. The course of action is to foster freedom. ~ R.J. Rummel

The start of the Argo Data vs Climate Models chart is completely bogus. There is nothing to suggest the 1st point of data of the argo models should be taken as the point form which to start the model projections.

I’ve said it before, but it does seem to be ignored, that you need to fit a bet fit line to the argo data and compare gradients to the IPCC model line. But even then I wonder where the so called IPCC line comes from. Is it just an average gradient of a “NOW” and “in 50 YEARS” IPCC projection. And which IPCC projection. Smells fishy to me.

Because, heating expands the gases of air and liquid water making them less dense so they will weigh less and so will rise and when they cool they will again condense, become more dense, and so will be heavier and sink.

At the same temperature some gases are heavier or lighter than air, methane and water vapour is lighter so will rise and carbon dioxide is heavier so will sink.

This is basic knowledge of the properties and processes of the natural world around us, meteorology was built on this knowledge.

This is how we get clouds, because water vapour lighter than air rises, its called evaporation, when heated that is speeded up.

AGW’s Greenhouse Effect doesn’t have the Water Cycle, it doesn’t have rain in its Carbon Cycle. Water has a residence time of 8-10 days in the atmosphere, so whenever it rains carbon dioxide is being washed out of the atmosphere, because, water (vapour,liquid,solid) in the atmosphere attracts all carbon dioxide in the vicinity – together forming carbonic acid which gives all natural unpolluted rain its pH of around 5.6-8.i

Carbon dioxide can’t accumulate for hundreds and thousands of years in the atmosphere – not in the real world.

Anyway that said, I came across this study when I was looking at volcanic activity around the Antarctic Peninsula, billed as a “pristine” site for measuring carbon dioxide, it is surrounded by volcanic production of carbon dioxide which can’t be for all practical purposes told apart from “man made fossil fuel production”.

“In these remote places, the biggest thing changing atmospheric carbon dioxide levels is the ocean. The plants whose seasonal cycles dominate atmospheric carbon dioxide concentrations in other parts of the world, simply don’t exist in such places. “If there is one place in the world where you can [measure changes in the ocean carbon sink with atmospheric measurements], it is over the Southern Ocean,” says Le Quéré. “It is the place where you have the least contaminated air, so to speak.”

“When Le Quéré plugged atmospheric measurements from the Southern Ocean between 1981 and 2004 into her model, she was startled by the result—something far more interesting than the Antarctic Circumpolar Wave. “The Southern Ocean carbon sink has not changed at all in 25 years. That’s unexpected because carbon dioxide is increasing so fast in the atmosphere that you would expect the sink to increase as well,” says Le Quéré. But it hadn’t. Instead, the Southern Ocean held steady, while atmospheric carbon dioxide concentrations climbed. Why?”

She’s come up with an odd explanation of ozone holes and winds without showing that any such actually happened, she sits behind a computer at guess where, I think it simply shows that there has been no “rising levels of carbon dioxide”, nothing out of the ordinary has been happening for the last 25 years the levels are most likely the same for the last hundred..

And if there had been anything out of the ordinary it would most likely be the volcanic activity around the area.

The idea that a trace gas in the atmosphere with no heat capacity to speak of can heat the oceans 700+ metres down is quite frankly, absurd. How can anyone call himself a scientist when this shows such utter lack of sense of scale?

Another way to look at the data is to first assume that, for all the errors the 0-700m data is roughly correct from 1955 onwards. That is the oceans cooled from 1955-1970; warmed in the 1970s, stabilized in the 1980s, rose in the for the next 13 years and virtually stopped warming in the last decade. This only not only reinforces, but amplifies the conclusions from the surface temperature data. That is, insofar as greenhouse gases cause global warming, the magnitude of that impact in the climate models should be decreasing with each year of new data.
The sudden change in trend when switching to the more accurate ARGO buoys would suggest that the warming trend of the 1990s was exaggerated. If it was not, then there is a slowdown in ocean 0-700m five years after global surface temperatures stopped rising. Yet CO2 levels have been rising steadily. Seems to me that the global warming hypothesis is undermined every which way you look at the data.

The article comments on the lack of reliable data for the pre-ARGO periods. A remark in one of the posts about the thermocline jogged my memory of reading about this in various thrillers such as the Hunt for Red October.
Might there be some useable data from the records of the 100s of submarines of the various navys? For that matter, they might also have info on Arctic ice extents and thicknesses. Of course it would probably be classified but has anyone investigated?

This one off the Antarctic in March last year could be seen from space.

It was caused by snow (containing iron) blowing onto the ocean surface and hence the algae bloom that lasted three weeks. Surely this is a major factor in some surface temperature warming, plus massive sequestration of CO2 which eventually ends up on the ocean floor after the various food chain inhabitants have had their feed.

Algae blooms of this type are totally natural and occurring repeatedly everywhere, surely they contribute something to the slight localised increase in water temperature.

Trenbeth’s missing energy is not hiding in the ocean it is hiding in the clouds. Remember the idiots are not measuring the amount of energy stored in water vapor. the latent heat of vaporization means dry air at 20C has less energy that air at 85% humidity.

Q: Let’s assume that you are able to show that cosmic radiation indeed does contribute a lot to cloud formation. What would that mean?

A: I think that the experiments are important in two ways.
Firstly, they would show that there is a natural source to climate change.
And the other point is that it would change our understanding of anthropogenic climate change.

Slightly O/T but since we are talking temps…
The whole mathematics of global average temperatures is bogus. There is a huge difference between a clear dry day that gets to, say, ~35C max (for most of the day 8am to 4pm), then achieves a 0C min overnight, compared to a day that peaks at 40C, but only for ~1hr (then clouds roll in) and drops to 20C min overnight. The “everage” temperature is as different as it feels to be out “in it”.

In the day of computers and continuous measurements, surely hourly weighted averages are better than the basic max/min 50/50 split??

Re ocean heating. As pointed out above a small change in ocean temperature involves a very large change in energy. Now consider thermohaline currents, hugh volumes of water slowly circulating around the world’s oceans. Just one circuit can take around a thousand years or more. The ‘missing heat’ ain’t going to show up any time soon.

It is true that the NODC’s ARGO-era ocean heat content (0-2000 meters) continues to warm globally, but always recall that the ARGO data had to be adjusted, modified, tweaked, corrected, whatever, in order to create that warming.

For something that is allegedly a global effect, only the total for the globe counts.
There’s wind and water currents and clouds covering the ocean and moving in semi-random ways. It is not surprising different basins warm at different rates. A discrepancy between north and south is expected when you consider the Southern hemisphere has a hell of a lot more percentage ocean than the north. It has more catchment area so it’s going to warm quicker.
However I am a bit surprised the discrepancy is so large.

Did the north pacific have more cloud cover and less hurricanes and tropical storms than in previous decades? No idea, but it might be worth checking out.

In the 60′s I spent time UNDER the North Atlantic. During some storms our submarine would sail in excess of 400ft. in depth to get out of the turbulence and we still took 25 degree rolls on either side of zero. I can imagine that wind blown water hitting an undersea obstruction and doing the same thing as a wave hitting a cliff on a beach. Warm currents also caused other effects on our “boat”. Once when we were at periscope depth, we entered a warm current and immediately dropped 400 ft. due to the difference in the density of warm water.
Regards

But this makes a very good point. There seems to be more thermal mixing than is taken into account. This is another indication of the oceans ability to move thermal energy around the globe at many levels. I’ve mentioned the Thermohaline currents before, water from the surface of many hundreds of years ago is returning to the surface in due course. If it has high levels of CO2 then a lot of that will be released into the atmosphere as the water warms. How do you measure that against mans petty production levels?

My WS-2040 provides more information than these buoys do. If they were given a shape similar to a weather vane, had a compass and strain gages, they would be able to provide more scientific information about a fish’s atmosphere.
Regards

[...] in atmospheric temps over the past 15-17 years, the latest bluff in climate alarmism is that the ‘missing heat’ is hiding at the bottom of the oceans. However since 2003, 3000+ ARGO satellite [...]

[...] in atmospheric temps over the past 15-17 years, the latest bluff in climate alarmism is that the ‘missing heat’ is hiding at the bottom of the oceans. However since 2003, 3000+ ARGO satellite [...]

[...] vanish with a journalist’s stroke of a pen because what should not exist, cannot be. “Climate skeptics’” web sites even claim that the measurement uncertainty in the average of 3000 Argo probes is the same as [...]

This entire article is based on a few absurdly wrong premises. First is that anything David Evans publishes on climate is worthy of trust. He’s a computer scientist, not a climate scientist, and routinely butchers the theory and practice of the science he ridicules. He plainly has no clear understanding of the physical science, or how climate models are built. (They are tested by hindcasting–i.e. they must be able to accurately model changes which have already been observed to have occurred.) Evans is in a class with Lord Monckton.

The second false premise is the author’s claim that Argo temperature data is precise to 0.1 deg C, a really blatant misreading of the instrument’s capability. A standard oceanographic CTD gives temperature to within 0.0001 deg C, hard as that may be to believe. Such instruments have been in use for decades. Their accuracy is attested to by how, for example, the acoustic systems we design using CTD-based oceanographic data, function as expected. In short, CTD precision has been amply vetted by other branches of ocean science.

he Argo temperature sensor is about ten times less precise than a CTD, so to within 0.001 deg C. The 0.1 the author comes up with is actually watts per square meter–i.e. a derived energy content. She applies the wrong units to the uncertainty, a glaringly obvious mistake. The trend in oceanic heat content for the upper 1500 m over the six years from the beginning of 2005 to the end of 2010 is an increase of 0.55 watts per square meter, well outside the 0.1 W/m2 uncertainty. Basic misunderstandings like this really cut the legs out of any skeptic argument. Since the different regions of the ocean where Argo floats operate are not at the same temperature, then multiple instruments operating in different areas do not serve to reduce uncertainty, true. But increasing length of the time series of each instrument does.

By the way–the upper 700 m “shallow” ocean is referred to as shallow because it’s typically the depth above the thermocline, traditionally considered the boundary between shallow and deep regions. It’s the region of the ocean most directly affected by insolation (which is how the ocean can gain heat that is not necessarily transferred from the atmosphere). The term is based more on the physical behavior of the ocean, than any consideration of “but it’s deeper than my bathtub!” And bear in mind that the thermocline disappears in the arctic. This so-called non-warming of the deep ocean likely has quite a bit to do with dramatically declining arctic ice cover.[However valid your argument may be, starting with potentially libelous statements is guaranteed to get you moderated] -Fly

Starting with an ad hom to show how unscientific you are? And you get that wrong too. Evans is not a computer scientist, he has six degrees in maths, stats and electrical engineering with impeccable ivy-league credentials. He trained at Fourier analysis with Ron Bracewell. There are few carbon accounting modelers on the planet who’ve worked at his level.

Models are not validated through hindcasting, they need to predict things that turn out to be accurate. They don’t. As for “butchering” science, and “lack of understanding”, since you can’t substantiate your claim, we’ll ignore that as just more bluster and petty malice, eh?

You can’t seriously be suggesting that one thermometer can give the average temperature of thousands of cubic kilometers of water to an accuracy of 0.001 degree? The water is not at a constant temperature within that area either vertically or horizontally, plus the water and the instrument moves.

It’s not the CTD temperature sensor that is the source of the uncertainty, so your objection is irrelevant and misleading. In any case, the 0.001C might work in a lab, but it’s not the case in the wild. The original Argo Science Report had an expected temperature sensor uncertainty of 0.005C. A study in 2008 measures the uncertainties of a moored CTD data estimated as 0.006C. Then there is Hadfield 2007 who investigated ARGO in upper 100m of Nth Atlantic, he says “The root-mean-square (RMS) difference in the Argo-based temperature field relative to the section measurements is about 0.6C.”

The buoys are not moored, and they also need to equilibrate with the temperature of the water around them. Worse ocean noise is a major source of error. There are simply so many eddy currents carrying water of different temperatures. (see this)

So you agree with the main point that multiple argo buoys do not reduce the uncertainty. Thanks, that’s exactly the point. I didn’t apply the wrong units — David said 0.1C and means 0.1C. It’s a rough estimate (and may be as high as 0.5C see Hadfield). Most of the uncertainty is probably ocean noise. The point with the ARGO results is that even Levitus 2012 can’t find enough warming to support the models. His result of 0.3Wm-2 was half what the models predicted. The other point is that the uncertainties are far larger than the IPCC admit.

[...] “These ARGO probes have measured the heating of the oceans caused by that 93.5 per cent of the heat energy reflected back down by the carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. It turns out that about two thirds remains in the upper ocean between the surface and a depth of 700 metres, while the remaining one third of that heat energy goes deeper into the ocean — between 700 and 2000 metres.” LIE – Since the ARGO floats have not detected ANY temperature rise in the oceans at any level, It is impossible to say where the non-existent heat goes! (The above claims are made based on misinterpretation of salinity, not temperature, data from ARGO – here). [...]

[...] vanish with a journalist’s stroke of a pen because what should not exist, cannot be. “Climate skeptics’” web sites even claim that the measurement uncertainty in the average of 3000 Argo probes is the same as that [...]

[...] vanish with a journalist’s stroke of a pen because what should not exist, cannot be. “Climate skeptics’” web sites even claim that the measurement uncertainty in the average of 3000 Argo probes is the same as that [...]